Text of the meditation
Vanity leading to excessive luxury in clothing is a vice that virtuous people should studiously avoid. An obtrusive display in clothing and jewellery bespeaks a vulgar and empty mind. Modest and cultured people are modest and becoming in their dress, and their spare money is wisely used to further enhance their culture and virtue.
Education and progress are of more importance to them than needless, vain apparel; and literature, art and science are encouraged thereby. A true refinement is in the mind and behaviour, and a mind adorned with virtue and intelligence cannot add to its attractiveness (though it may detract from it) by an ostentatious display of the body.
Simplicity in dress, as in other things, is the best.
James Allen (1864–1912), Book of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1913) – public-domain text, gently modernised.
The original 1913 text is in the public domain.
