How fleeting the sorrows of youth, how slight the foundations on which the young build towers of despair - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

To possess character is to be useful, and to be useful is to be independent, and to be useful and independent, is to be happy, even in the midst of sorrow; for sorrow is not necessarily unhappiness.

One ship drives east and another drives west
With the selfsame winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.
Like the winds of the seas are the ways of fate,
As we voyage along through the life:
Tis the set of a soul
That decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife.

Who would attain to summits still and fair, Must nerve himself through valleys of despair.