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Know how to help yourself. There is no better companion in the great struggles of life than a stout heart. When it flags it must be supported by the organs that stand about. Anxieties grow less in one who knows how to defend himself. Never surrender to fate, for then she ends by making herseelf intolerable. Some help themselves little with their burdens; in fact they double them because they do not know how to carry them. One who really knows himself brings thought to the support of his frailities. Wherefore the person of intelligence comes out victorious from under everything, even the unlucky stars.

The Art Of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian

From The Power of Concentration by Theron Q. Dumont (1915):

I am that which I think myself to be.

You must study yourself and your weaknesses. No man gets over a fence by wishing himself on the other side. He must climb. If you are standing still, or going backward, there is something wrong. You are the man to find out what is wrong. Think hard about the fact that men who have got what you envy got it by working for it. Don’t pity yourself, criticize yourself. You know that the only thing in the world that you have got to count upon is yourself.

“Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.”

From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance. Now go sell something to someone.