Daily Inspiration Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

L'Engle’s line cuts against the American itch to treat talent like a moral achievement. By insisting we “can’t take any credit,” she reframes gifts as accident: genetics, timing, upbringing, the particular teachers who noticed you, the doors that happened to open. That’s not false modesty; it’s a corrective to a culture that turns aptitude into entitlement. If you didn’t earn the raw materials, then superiority collapses into gratitude, and “deserving” becomes a shakier story we tell ourselves.

The pivot, “It’s how we use them that counts,” is where the ethical weight lands. L’Engle isn’t romanticizing effort for its own sake; she’s relocating agency. Talent is static. Use is a series of choices: whether you practice, whether you share, whether you leverage ability to dominate or to serve, whether you keep creating when the applause fades. In her fiction and nonfiction, L’Engle keeps returning to vocation as stewardship - a spiritual and communal responsibility, not a private trophy.

The subtext is also quietly political. If talent isn’t credit, then the gap between the “gifted” and the overlooked looks less like meritocracy and more like distribution. Her sentence offers a way to honor excellence without worshipping it, and to judge people not by the luck of their starting line but by what they do with what they’ve been handed. It’s bracing because it denies both the ego’s bragging rights and the ego’s alibi.