When you actively engage in gradually refining yourself, you retreat from your lazy ways of covering yourself or making excuses. Instead of feeling a persistent current of low-level shame, you move forward by using the creative possibilities of this moment, your current situation.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

What is yours is to play the assigned part well. But to choose it belongs to someone else

Renew every day your conversation with God: Do this even in preference to eating. Think more often of God than you breathe.

No great thing is created suddenly. There must be time. Give your best and always be kind.

Freedom is secured not by the fulfillment of one's desires, but by the removal of desire.

You may be always victorious if you will never enter into any contest where the issue does not wholly depend upon yourself.