"Now, looking back at that time, I can clearly see that the only faith I had, apart from the animal instincts motivating my life, was a belief in perfection. But what this perfection consisted of, and what its aim was, were unclear to me. I tried to perfect myself intellectually and studied everything I came upon in life. I tried to perfect my will, setting myself rules i tried to follow. I perfected myself physically, practicing all kinds of exercises in order to develop my strength and dexterity, and I cultivated endurance and patience by undergoing all kinds of hardship. All this I regarded as perfection. The beginning of it was, of course, moral perfection, but this soon replaced by a belief in general perfection, that is a desire to be better not in my own eyes or before God but in the eyes of other people. And very soon this determination to be better than others became a wish to be more powerful than others: more famous, more important, wealthier."
-A Confession and Other Religious Writings by Leo Tolstoy

Analyze, take what you can, leave what you don't understand/don't like.