complaint, fear, or reluctance. The supreme vice is shallowness.
Whatever is realised is right.

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and
forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising
what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised
by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a
prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean
that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace,
and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody
else - the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons,
the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain
falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and
making it silver - would all be tainted for me, and lose their
healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret
one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny
one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own
life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and
unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has
cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the
play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the
curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in
its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into
noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself
is base, cruel and degrading; nay, more, may find in these its most
august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most
perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or destroy.