I saw the following quote in an article about how meaning, value, and fulfillment can be lived/derived/experienced from “normal” kinds of lives:

“Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

–Middlemarch by George Eliot