Daily Inspiration Quote by Roald Dahl

A small line with a mercenary glint: Roald Dahl takes an industrial truism and turns it into a character sketch. “Black gold” is a phrase that usually rides on oil-boom swagger, but Dahl reroutes it to coal and, more pointedly, to shipbrokers. The wording isn’t neutral. Coal isn’t precious in itself; it becomes precious inside a system that can monetize bulk, soot, and scarcity. Dahl’s move is to spotlight the middlemen who don’t dig the stuff up or burn it to stay warm; they translate it into profit. That’s the quiet bite.

The intent feels doubly Dahl-ish: briskly economical, slightly wicked. He’s compressing an entire era of fossil-fueled modernity into six words, then letting the reader hear the clink of commission. “To shipbrokers” is the tell. It frames value as perspective, not fact. For households, coal is grime and necessity; for miners, it’s danger and wages; for shipbrokers, it’s an elegant abstraction, a commodity that travels, stacks, and invoices cleanly on paper even if it filthies every hand it touches.

Contextually, Dahl’s lifetime spans coal’s reign and decline: a Britain built on it, then slowly rebranded away from it. The subtext is about how economies launder dirty realities into glamorous metaphors. Call it “black gold” and you get to sound like an alchemist rather than a broker profiting from smoke. Dahl doesn’t moralize; he just lets the metaphor expose the moral math.