And so you must understand that we have to make something very strong in ourselves by the help of the Work little by little so that we can withstand the shifting scene, moments of happiness followed by moments of depression, moments of hope followed by moments of despair, in order that we may have a center of gravity within ourselves so that we are not shaken because now we feel happy and the next moment we feel unhappy.

Personality, roughly speaking, lives by comparison with others. Real ‘I’ does not exist through comparison. Therefore you will understand that when it is said that personality roughly lives by comparison, you only have to study yourself or others in this light for a short time to see how easily everyone is upset or chagrined, and how brittle this feeling of 'I' is, in which people keep on trying to live—that is, in the feeling of 'I' derived from some aspect of personality.