Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Interpretation
Let go of daily mistakes and approach each new day with a fresh perspective.
This quote emphasizes the importance of concluding each day by reflecting on what has happened, acknowledging both accomplishments and mistakes without lingering on them. Emerson encourages embracing a new day as an opportunity to start afresh, promoting a mindset that fosters resilience and optimism for the future.
In practice
In a motivational speech to encourage people to overcome their failures.
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?
It's not like I idolize this one guy Machiavelli. I idolize that type of thinking where you do whatever's gonna make you achieve your goal.
Anything is a blessing which makes us pray.
A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.
George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.
We may give advice, but not the sense to use it.
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