“I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. When people ask me what has kept me going through the troubles that come to all of us, I always reply: ‘I stood yesterday. I can stand today. And I will not permit myself to think about what might happen tomorrow.’ I have known want and struggle and anxiety and despair. I have always had to work beyond the limit of my strength. As I look back upon my life, I see it as a battlefield strewn with the wrecks of dead dreams and broken hopes and shattered illusions – a battle in which I always fought with the odds tremendously against me, and which has left me scarred and bruised and maimed and old before my time. Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to shed over the past and gone sorrows; no envy for the women who have been spared all I have gone through. For I have lived. They only existed. I have drunk the cup of life down to its very dregs. They have only sipped the bubbles on top of it. I know things they will never know. I see things to which they are blind. It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world. I have learned in the great University of Hard Knocks a philosophy that no woman who has had an easy life ever acquires. I have learned to live each day as it comes and not to borrow trouble by dreading the morrow.”
“’I Stood Yesterday. I Can Stand Today’ by Dorothea Dix in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living