To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
Expect problems and eat them for breakfast.
Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.
If you think you can do it, you can.
If you've got a talent, protect it.
You never know what motivates you.
The dog that trots about finds a bone.
Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.
Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds.
The most effective way to do it, is to do it.
I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn't.