Ideals Are Like Star: An Introduction

Abstract

We hear a great deal about the environment these days. But people of different ages and experience have very different ideas of what environment really means. A newborn child has its own pretty definite concept—centered on itself and extending to a room and a familiar face. As the child grows, its environment expands to take in a house and a street. With early education those surroundings quickly stretch to a country and a world.

Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But tike the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, your destiny.

Senator Carl Shurz, in Faneuil Hall, Boston, 1861