If you succeed in life, you must do it in spite of the efforts of others to pull you down. There is nothing in the idea that people are willing to help those who help themselves. People are willing to help a man who can't help himself, but as soon as a man is able to help himself, and does it, they join in making his life as uncomfortable as possible.

• adversity
• criticism

Every successful man I have heard of has done the best he could with conditions as he found them, and not waited until the next year for better.

• circumstance
• initiative

A woman who has never seen her husband fishing doesn't know what a patient man she has married.

• marriage