He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Interpretation
True richness comes from making the most of each day without being burdened by worry.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that true wealth is not measured by material possessions but by the ability to fully seize and enjoy each day. It suggests that allowing oneself to be consumed by worry and anxiety robs an individual of their time and peace, ultimately hindering their richness in life experiences.
In practice
During a motivational speech on managing stress, you could use this quote to illustrate the importance of mindfulness.
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?
I think I'll just go down and have some pudding and wait for it all to turn up - it always does in the end.
To accept oneβs past β oneβs history β is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
I remember I was walking through a store, and I saw clothes a 25-year-old would wear. And the conversation in my head was, 'I'm not young and fabulous anymore.' But, immediately, there was a voice that said, 'No, you can be older and fabulous.' In other words, still just as fabulous, but in a different way.
"He passed over his fall, and appointed him first of the Apostles; wherefore He said: ' 'Simon, Simon,' etc. (in Ps. cxxix. 2). God allowed him to fall, because He meant to make him ruler over the whole world, that, remembering his own fall, he might forgive those who should slip in the future. And that what I have said is no guess, listen to Christ Himself saying: 'Simon, Simon, etc.'"
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.
True abundance has nothing to do with what I am having, but everything to do with what I am being.
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