What
Cassius exclaimed to Brutus is exactly applicable to you:
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
So do not whine as to your hard fate; do not go to pitying yourself.
No whimper should come from a masculine throat.
A man who does either of these things thereby proves that he ought not
to succeed--and he will not succeed. Indeed, how do you know that
these fires of misfortune through which you are passing are not heat
designed by Fate to temper the steel of your real character. Certainly
that ought to be true if you have the stuff in you. And if you have
not the stuff in you, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, and
all the universities of Germany cannot lift you an inch above your
normal level. "You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is our
pithy and brutally truthful folk-saying.
"What do you raise on these shaly hills?" I asked one time of that
ideal American statesman, Senator Orville H. Platt, of Connecticut.
"Manhood," answered this great New Englander, and then he went on to
point out the seemingly contradictory facts that a poor soil
universally produces stern and upright character, solid and productive
ability, and dauntless courage.
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