Every virtue has a fleeting existence — they are always a moment away of disappearing. Each noble quality of integrity stands on pillars that require both conscientious effort to create and conscientious effort to ensure that they endure. A house requires many hours of toil to build yet only a single matchstick will crumble it down to ash in a fraction of that time. Vice requires no conscientious effort; it festers in the darkness of indulgence to the weakest tendencies a man has within him. Virtue and vice cannot exist in the same space. Either one or the other, counterparts to one another like two opposite poles, stand in one exact spot. Honesty and dishonesty, for instance, will occupy psychological territory according to a man’s self-awareness and the choices that are made by its presence or absence. He will either base his actions on a set of principles that, regardless of the benefits and disadvantages of circumstance, must be exercised and upheld. Or on the whim of circumstance he will falter, any such principles will be ignored, and the virtue will be substituted for the vice. It is only by a man’s self-awareness, that subtle coating of intelligence that draws from countless moments of experience, that he will favour the upward choice that requires effort to the downward one that requires none.