From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.
We cultivate our feelings the way we cultivate a garden: we can't entirely prevent weeds from coming up, but we can take care to remove them before they do much harm. We cannot simply choose never to get angry, and we cannot fully control it when we do get angry, but the more disciplined our moral lives are, the more likely we will be able to keep our anger under some measure of control. For example, we can discipline ourselves in how we think about people in private (not cultivating a sense of resentment against them), how we talk about them behind their back (not gossiping), and how we interact with them in public (not speaking with disrespect or trying to embarrass them). These disciplines will not eliminate any poisonous feelings toward other people, but they will keep them from growing strong and overshadowing the better feelings in the garden of our souls.
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