‘It is better to hitch your wagon to a star than to wander aimlessly through life.’ The sentence contains one of the most popular English sayings which comes to mind whenever we think about being ambitious and aspiring to achieve more. ‘Hitch your wagon to a star’, we say to someone encouraging him to be brave and to set optimistic goals. But what is the origin of this saying? In 1870 Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American lecturer, poet and essayist, published his essay ‘Civilization’ in which he wrote that a civilized man will move on to accomplish more and more complex tasks and he will use the powers of nature to solve problems at hand: ‘Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing. Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-...
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