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 men 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 men whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision
that makes them little brothers to the entire world. I have learned in the
great University of Hard Knocks a philosophy that no man 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. It is the dark menace of the future that
makes cowards of us. I put that dread from me because experience has taught me
that when the time comes that I so fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it
will be given me. Little annoyances no longer have the power to affect me.
After you have seen your whole edifice of happiness topple and crash in ruins
about you, it never matters to you again that a servant forgets to put the
doilies under the finger bowls, or the cook spills the soup. I have learned not
to expect too much of people, and so I can still get happiness out of the
friend who isn't quite true to me or the acquaintance who gossips. Above all, I
have acquired a sense of humour, because there were so many things over which I
had either cry or laugh. And when a man can joke over his troubles instead of
having hysterics, nothing can ever hurt him much again. I do not regret the
hardships I have known, because through them I have touched life at every point
I have lived. And it was worth the price I had to pay>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
