George Lawrence Parker

“ This is not the same as ambition, but it is a strong star. I may have an ambition without having purpose. I may want to learn a great deal, but forget to ask what I hope to do with my knowledge. An ambitious person who has no purpose will find that his one star means very little. If I have purpose, my ambition has another star to keep company with it. I may sometimes see that I cannot fulfil my ambition, but I need never give up my purpose. For instance, I know a man of great ability whose ambition was to be a physician. ”

“ It would be almost better to give up both ambition and purpose than to give up hope. We have all heard the old saying, “While there ’s life, there ’s hope.” That does not refer to sick people. It means that any one who is truly alive keeps on hoping. Hope is the everlasting sense that we are coming out somewhere. Hope tells us that our self-improvements, the great world, all the labor of men and women, that all of this has actual value. ”

“ And yet you know when people stop wondering, it will be a still stranger world that we live in. We go to school to learn things, but we go still more to increase our wonder. The great scientist Agassiz could wonder for days over some little stone which I would perhaps just look at and say, “Oh, it ’s only a pebble.” He knew so much about stones that every common rock was full of wonder for him. The more we know of our life and our world, the more wonderful they are. It is only the wise person who knows how to wonder, and only the ignorant person who gives up wondering. ”

“ What I mean by this is that the world is very old and dull and uninteresting to some people, not because it is really so, but because they have called it so. They have forgotten to wonder. They have put out one of the brightest stars in their whole sky. ”

“ Its light comes and goes. When we are very busy, we do not need it so much, but when we sit down to ask just what it is that we are busy about, hope comes out and says, “Here I am; this is the reason you are busy.” ”

“ Ralph Waldo Emerson said in one of his wise essays, “Hitch your wagon to a star’; by which he meant that sometimes the only way to make a thing go is to tie it on to something above it. “Hitching our wagon to a star,” means that our lives often run slowly or come to a dead stop, unless we find something above us to lift them upward. It is this that we need when we feel discouraged. In olden days, the study of the stars was very common, and for a long time they were the only lights that people had at night. ”