Repentance
While thinking about new year's resolutions, I came across this passage:
Do not say that repentance is not necessary except for serious transgressions such as illicit sexual relations, robbery and theft. Just as a person must repent of acts such as these, he is required to examine his bad traits and turn away from such negative characteristics as anger, hostility, jealousy, the tendency to ridicule, pursuit of material possessions and honor, and gluttony. A person must repent of each of these. These offenses are more difficult to deal with than the other ones because such traits affect our actions at all times, and it is difficult for a person to refrain from such habitual behavior.Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance, 7.3
(Thanks to USCJ. There are lots of other translations of this floating around that give slightly different senses to what Maimonides was trying to convey. And whatever he meant to convey, I don't mean to say that the concept of repentance that Maimonides had in mind when he wrote this -- I suspect he called it teshuva, though I don't happen to have the Mishneh Torah around in Hebrew -- is easily accessible to me in translation at such a great distance.)
