The line opens a set of ten resolutions titled “Just for Today,” whose earliest documented appearance is Dr. Frank Crane’s syndicated column in the Boston Globe of 29 May 1921 — where it reads “not tackle my whole life-problem at once,” not “all my problems at once.” Dale Carnegie reprinted the essay in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) and credited it to “the late Sibyl F. Partridge”; Quote Investigator ↗ calls that credit a mistake and tentatively credits Crane, noting future evidence could shift the attribution.
“Just for today, I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle all my problems at once” Not Dale Carnegie. The "Just for Today" resolutions trace to Dr. Frank Crane's syndicated column "Dr Crane Says: Just for Today," Boston Globe, 29 May 1921, p. E4 — where the first resolution reads "…and not tackle my whole life-problem at once," not "all my problems at once." Carnegie reprinted the essay in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) and credited it to "the late Sibyl F. Partridge"; Quote Investigator calls that credit a mistake and tentatively credits Crane. Source: quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/26/just-for-today/ Verbatim: “Just for Today, I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle my whole life-problem at once. I can do some things for twelve hours that would appall me if I felt I had to keep them up for a lifetime.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Dale Carnegie. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The 1921 column
Work
Dr Crane Says: “Just for Today”
Published
Boston Globe, 29 May 1921, E4 — syndicated to other papers
Author
Frank Crane (1861–1928), tentatively credited by Quote Investigator
Original wording
“my whole life-problem at once,” not “all my problems at once”
Just for Today, I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle my whole life-problem at once. I can do some things for twelve hours that would appall me if I felt I had to keep them up for a lifetime.
Resolution 1 of 10
As transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗ from the Boston Globe of 29 May 1921. Crane framed the set as “ten resolutions to make when you awake in the morning.” Wikiquote’s transcription of the same resolution differs in several small ways — “my whole life’s problem” for “my whole life-problem,” “I can do things for 12 hours” for “I can do some things for twelve hours,” “if I had to” for “if I felt I had to,” and no comma after “today” — and both differ from the wording that circulates today.
1880 — a different poem, same title. A religious poem, “To-Day,” appears in The Messenger of the Sacred Heart of Jesus credited to “S. M. X.”; by 1916 the same words appear in the Goucher College Hymnal attributed to Sybil F. Partridge. It is thematically similar and sometimes called “Just for Today,” but it is not the ten resolutions (Quote Investigator ↗).
29 May 1921 — the earliest known instance. The ten resolutions run in the Boston Globe, page E4, under the standing head “DR CRANE SAYS,” titled “Just for Today” (Quote Investigator ↗).
1932 — the byline slips. The Christian Science Monitor reprints the resolutions, with some textual changes, credited to “Hugh Barret Dobbs” (Quote Investigator ↗).
1948 — Carnegie makes it famous, under the wrong name.How to Stop Worrying and Start Living carries the essay with the introduction that it “was written by the late Sibyl F. Partridge”; Wikiquote’s sourced Crane entry records that Carnegie, Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon Family Groups all republished the piece “usually without correct attribution” (Wikiquote ↗).
✓Public domain
The source text is a United States newspaper column first published on 29 May 1921 — well before 1931 — so Frank Crane’s “Just for Today” resolutions are in the public domain in the US; Crane himself died in 1928. One honest caveat: the clause that circulates today, “not tackle all my problems at once,” is not the 1921 wording, and no source consulted here documents which later reprinting introduced it. Carnegie’s 1948 book remains in copyright as a book, but that protects his own text, not the public-domain essay he reprinted inside it.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Three wrong names and one rewritten clause
Almost everything about the way this line circulates is off — the author, the author Carnegie substituted, and the wording itself. The one thing not in doubt is that Dale Carnegie never claimed it.
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The popular creditDale Carnegie popularizer, not author
Carnegie included the “Just for Today” essay in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) and introduced it by saying it “was written by the late Sibyl F. Partridge” — so he explicitly disclaimed authorship. The book’s vast readership is simply why his is the name attached to it now (Quote Investigator ↗).
✕
Carnegie’s own creditSibyl F. Partridge mistaken
Quote Investigator’s judgement is blunt: “Carnegie incorrectly ascribed to Partridge an essay whose first known appearance was many years after 1880 in the newspaper column of Frank Crane.” The likely cause was a separate 1880 poem, “To-Day,” often credited to Partridge and sometimes also called “Just for Today” (Quote Investigator ↗).
✕
A 1932 reprintingHugh Barrett Dobbs also wrong
The Christian Science Monitor published Crane’s ten resolutions in 1932 under the name “Hugh Barret Dobbs,” with some textual changes along the way — an early sign of how freely the piece was being re-credited and re-edited (Quote Investigator ↗).
✕
The wording“not tackle all my problems at once” later rewording
The 1921 text reads “not tackle my whole life-problem at once.” The familiar modern clause is a plainer rewrite, and no source consulted here documents who made the change — the piece was, per Wikiquote, “modified and republished usually without correct attribution” by Carnegie, Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon Family Groups and many others (Wikiquote ↗).
✓The earliest documented appearance of these ten resolutions is Dr. Frank Crane’s syndicated column “Just for Today,” Boston Globe, 29 May 1921 — and Quote Investigator ↗ tentatively credits Crane as their creator, expressly allowing that new evidence could shift the attribution.
Context
How a newspaper filler became everyone’s property
“Just for Today” is not an aphorism so much as a programme: ten one-day resolutions, of which this is the first. That structure is what made it travel. A reader could clip the column, fold it into a billfold, and carry it — and a text that lives in a wallet rather than on a title page loses its byline fast.
Lose it, it did — though not every time. Quote Investigator tracks the same ten resolutions reappearing under a different name in the Christian Science Monitor in 1932, correctly credited to “Dr. Frank Crane, D.D.” in the Masonic weekly Masonic Historiology in 1944, under Sibyl F. Partridge’s name in Carnegie’s bestseller in 1948, and unattributed in a folder handed out by a local branch of Alcoholics Anonymous, described by a writer in This Week Magazine in 1953. Each reprinting was an act of goodwill; most of them also sanded off a little more of Frank Crane, and the 1944 Masonic version is the exception that kept his name.
A text that lives in a wallet rather than on a title page loses its byline fast.
Why the confusion was almost inevitable
Two different works shared the title. A religious poem, “To-Day,” appeared in The Messenger of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1880 credited to “S. M. X.”; by 1916 the same words appeared in the Goucher College Hymnal attributed to Sybil F. Partridge, and that piece was sometimes called “Just for Today.” Quote Investigator’s reading is that the existence of this thematically similar, identically titled work “probably caused a misunderstanding” — which is how Carnegie came to put Partridge’s name on Crane’s resolutions.
Worth keeping the two claims apart: the 1880 poem is a genuinely earlier text, but it is a different text. Nothing in the record suggests the ten resolutions themselves predate 1921.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1861–1928 · American clergyman and syndicated newspaper columnist
Born in Urbana, Illinois in 1861 and ordained in 1882, Frank Crane served as a pastor for more than twenty-five years before turning, from 1909, to syndicated newspaper columns and books of reflections and advice (Wikipedia ↗). His short daily essays — collected in volumes such as Four Minute Essays and Everyday Wisdom — ran under the standing head “Dr Crane Says,” exactly the format that made a piece like “Just for Today” easy to clip, pass along, and eventually detach from its author. He died at Nice, France, in 1928. His best-known surviving text is one most people have read without ever seeing his name on it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Frank Crane, “Dr Crane Says: Just for Today,” Boston Globe, 29 May 1921, E4 — the earliest documented appearance of the ten resolutions per Quote Investigator. Reprinted, with the credit to “the late Sibyl F. Partridge,” in Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Just for today, I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle all my problems at once’?” Last verified 30 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/just-for-today-i-will-try-to-live-through-this-day-only-and/