Interesting thoughts from Marcus Aurelius. I am inserting the (A) and (B). Don't let the old-fashioned use of the word "appetite" mislead you. By "appetite" here he is referring to impulse, lust, covetousness, not genuine injury or survival instinct.
"Theophrastus was right...when he maintained that wrongdoing associated with pleasure calls for harsher condemnation than that associated with pain. And generally speaking, in the one case (A) the offender is more like a person who has first been injured by another and has been driven by pain to lose his temper, while in the other (B), he has been impelled to do wrong as a result of his own inclination, being carried away by appetite to act as he does."
From Scripture: Proverbs 6:30 (NRSA) Thieves are not despised who steal only to satisfy their appetite when they are hungry. That's (A). We all feel compassion for the person who steals food to feed a starving family. It should never have to come to that.
(B) is a girl running through the shattered windows of a ransacked store crowing, "I got stuff!" No sympathy. Only loathing and disgust.
Also from Marcus Aurelius. Warning: the slightly old-fashioned English (of this translation; the original was in Greek!) may lead you to misinterpret it. Don't rush to conclusions.
"Rarely is a person seen to be in a bad way because he has failed to attend to what is passing in the soul of another; but those who fail to pay careful attention to the motions of their own souls are bound to be in a wretched plight."
In plain modern English: It won't kill you not to obsess with what others might be thinking, but you'll wind up in pretty hot water if you don't take charge of your own thought processes.
Probably the most psychically (I mean, in the psyche) wasteful, self-corroding, debilitating habit we ever indulge in is to fashion a virtual hologram of somebody ELSE'S head in our own head and...ARGUE with it. It's an utter delusion. Something that simply isn't THERE.
The only thing in your own head is you. Finally coming to a crystal-clear realization of this is the quickest recipe for exorcising "ghosts." Whoever is bothering you, trailing you, snapping at you, hounding you, laying in wait for you, second-guessing you, or in any other way hanging on to you inside there, is (surprise) YOU.
When you really realize that, you can whip the mask off that phantom--the image of that person from somewhere in your past who for some reason got under your craw--as I was saying, you can whip the mask off that phantom and see that the "ghost" was YOU all the time. And...simply...stop doing that to yourself.
There is a freedom in life that is terrifying, which means you have to have the guts to exorcise the "ghosts", both past, present and future. It can feel like committing murder. It isn't.
Whatever you imagine others are thinking is...you, thinking. You can just as easily...NOT. You see.
