This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
Interpretation
Emerson emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment and cherishing today rather than dwelling on the past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote highlights the value of the present day, encouraging individuals to appreciate the opportunities and joys it brings. He suggests that today is precious and filled with hope, implying that one should not let regret over the past diminish the significance of the current moment. By calling attention to the idea that each day holds potential invitations for new experiences, he advocates for a mindful approach to life, focusing on what can be done now rather than lamenting what has been lost.
In practice
In a motivational speech about mindfulness, one might say: 'As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, this day is all that is good and fair, so let’s embrace it fully.'
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks and breaking off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.
Gay or straight? So what? It doesn't matter to me. We have to be concerned about other people regardless.
...Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.
If you give your soul up to anything earthly, whether it be the wealth, or the honours, or the pleasures of this world, you might as well hunt after the mirage of the desert or try to collect the mists of the morning, or to store up for yourself the clouds of the sky, for all these things are passing away.
In the poor and outcast we see Christ’s face; by loving and helping the poor, we love and serve Christ.
I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
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