“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”
Ray Bradbury · Dandelion Wine, 1957
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Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
About this quote
Meaning
Emerson is offering a practice as much as a philosophy: he wants the reader to make a conscious, repeated choice to treat each day as a gift rather than a burden or a routine. The phrase "write it on your heart" signals that this is not a casual suggestion. It asks for genuine internalization, not just intellectual agreement. The underlying idea is that how we frame our experience shapes what we get from it, and that gratitude and presence are habits that can be deliberately cultivated.
Context
Emerson's writing consistently returned to themes of self-reliance, optimism, and the possibilities available to any person willing to think clearly and live deliberately. This line reflects his broader belief that attitude and inner life are more determinative of human happiness than outward circumstances. It belongs to a tradition in his work of offering practical moral instruction wrapped in memorable, almost scriptural language, designed to be carried around and returned to rather than merely read once.
About the author
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 to 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who was a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement in New England. His essays and lectures argued for the primacy of individual intuition, the importance of nature, and the possibility of a deeply lived life. Works such as "Self-Reliance" and "Nature" had a profound influence on American literature and thought, and his ideas continued to shape writers and thinkers well beyond his own lifetime.
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