I guess I understand a public intellectual to be somebody who moves public discourse forward: someone who either says something new or says something that everybody knows to be true but is afraid to express.
Interpretation
A public intellectual fosters meaningful conversations by introducing new ideas or voicing common truths that are often avoided.
Lionel Shriver defines a public intellectual as an individual who contributes significantly to public discussion. This person plays a crucial role by either presenting original thoughts or articulating well-known truths that others may hesitate to express, thereby moving societal discourse in a positive direction and encouraging open dialogue.
In practice
In a lecture about societal issues, I could quote this to emphasize the importance of thoughtful dialogue.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
We go into rural communities and all we do, like has been done in this room, is create the space. When these girls sit, you unlock intelligence, you unlock passion, you unlock commitment, you unlock focus, you unlock great leaders.
Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.