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?
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.
I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.
Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds.
My failures have been errors in judgment, not of intent.
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