Edward Everett Hale

I am only one, but still I am one; I cannot do everything; but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

Genuinely Hale and long associated with him as the credo of his Lend a Hand movement; it is standard in reference collections with consistent attribution and appears in nineteenth-century printings. I cannot pin the earliest appearance — candidates include his Lend a Hand writings and the Ten Times One Is Ten circle material — so no print source is asserted. Sometimes rendered in a slightly compressed form.

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