Hitch your wagon to a star. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · Smartyfair

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Hitch your wagon to a star. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · Smartyfair

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882 · writer · 1800s USARalph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist and poet who encouraged people to trust their own minds and think for themselves.8 quotes

Source foundCourage

In plain words

Aim at something far bigger than you can reach today.

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Where these words come from

How sure this is: 95% sureThese words were traced back to where they first appeared. That source is listed below.
What turned up: From "Civilization," a chapter in Society and Solitude (1870). Project Gutenberg full text, ebook #69258.
Work: Society and Solitude — "Civilization"
Occasion: 1870
Sources checked: gutenberg.orgChecked using claude-sonnet-5, 21 August 2026Society and Solitude, full text — 'Civilization' chapter

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More from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

More on courage

You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Marcus Aurelius

1800s

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge is the antidote to fear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

Rabindranath Tagore

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live.

If you see what is right and fail to act on it, you lack courage.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Marcus Aurelius