When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

The image suggests that every act of illumination—knowledge, progress, moral certainty, artistic creation—inevitably produces an accompanying darkness: unintended consequences, exclusions, or new problems revealed by the very light we cast. It cautions against naïve optimism and one-sided narratives of “good” outcomes, implying that clarity and power come with responsibility for what they obscure or harm. Read ethically, it argues for humility: to do good work (or make change) is not to erase shadow, but to acknowledge it, account for it, and remain attentive to what our solutions displace or conceal.