This reminded me of this passage from Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang:
> None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each time you do something generous, you're shaping yourself into someone who's more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.
The soul takes on the color of its thoughts - Marcus Aurelius. In context, he wrote about the reams of thoughts that fly in our heads and how we automatically rubber stamp most of them as "true".