How to spend a day nobly

“ How to spend a day nobly is the problem to be solved, beside which all the great reforms which are preached seem to me trivial. If any day has not the privilege of a great action, then, at least, raise it by a wise passion. If thou canst not do, at least abstain. Now the memory of the few past little days so works in me that I hardly dare front a new day when I leave my bed. When shall I come to the end of these shameful days and organize honour in every day? ”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson [from his journals, Sept. 12, 1839], in EMERSON IN HIS JOURNALS, selected and edited by Joel Porte, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) - London (England), 1982.