Stop before cultivating an inordinate self-conceit, and remember that real worth is mostly modest, while those persons are the vainest who have the least to be vain of.
Stop before contracting a habit of exaggeration. This is the stock-in-trade of the cheap penny-a-liner, while the strength of the true historian lies in conscientious statement.
Stop short of fancying that such exaggeration can impress others with your imaginative powers. Were this true, the grimaces of a baboon might be ascribed to emotional fine frenzy.
Stop before contracting the habit of lying, even in a harmless way. But this fault is as naturally the outgrowth of extravagance or looseness of statement, as is the noxious weed of the miscellaneous muck that stimulates it into useless being.
Stop short of listlessness in word, look and deed. A perfunctory person is never in demand, and Rip Van Winkle only indemnified society in sleeping out his twenty years.
Stop, and do nothing, rather than procrastinate indefinitely. Untrustworthiness is the final result of procrastination, and a reputation for that is tantamount to elimination from the world’s employment.
Stop far short of any indulgence that can affect your general reputation. “The two most precious things this side the grave,” says Lacon, “are our reputation and our life; the most contemptible whisper may deprive us of the one, the weakest weapon of the other.”
Stop the use of tobacco, if addicted to it, but especially in the form of chewing, the vileness of this practice is in no wise mitigated by its prevalence.
Stop smoking, also, at its first threatened inroad upon the general health. To persist in it thereafter is a confession of both moral and mental weakness.
Stop on the threshold of gambling of every description, and, if already in the toils, shut down on the practice with all the ponderosity at your command.