Monks, there are beings who suffer not from disease of body for 1 year, for 2 years... even for 100 years. But it is hard to find in the world beings who can admit freedom from mental disease even for one moment, save only those who have destroyed delusions.
Anguttara Nikaya (A.II:143); Samyutta Nikaya (S.III.:2)

Do not think lightly of evil that not the least consequence will come of it. A whole waterpot will fill up from dripping drops of water. A fool fills himself with evil, just a little at a time.

Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind.

Do everything with a mind that lets go. Do not expect any praise or reward. If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom. Your struggles with the world will have come to an end.

Someone commented, I can observe desire and aversion in my mind, but its hard to observe delusion.
You're riding on a horse and asking where the horse is! was Ajahn Chah's reply.

Just know yourself, this is your witness. Don't make decisions on the strength of your desires. Desires can puff us up into thinking we are something which we're not. We must be very circumspect.

We have a saying in Tibet that engaging in the practice of virtue is as hard as driving a donkey uphill, whereas engaging in destructive activities is as easy as rolling boulders downhill. It is also said that negative impulses arise as spontaneously as rain and gather momentum just like water following the course of gravity. What makes matters worse is our tendency to indulge negative thoughts and emotions even while agreeing that we should not. It is essential, therefore, to address directly our tendency to put things off and while away our time in meaningless activities and shrink from the challenge of transforming our habits on the grounds that it is too great a task. In particular, it is important not to allow ourselves to be put off by the magnitude of others' suffering. The misery of millions is not a cause for pity. Rather it is a cause for developing compassion.
We must also recognize that the failure to act when it is clear that action is required may itself be a negative action....inaction is attributable less to negative thoughts and emotions as to a lack of compassion. It is thus important that we are no less determined to overcome our habitual tendency to laziness than we are to exercise restraint in response to afflictive emotion.
Ethics for the New Millennium

Laziness comes in many forms, all of which result in procrastination, putting off practice to another time. Sometimes laziness is a matter of being distracted from meditation by morally neutral activities, like sewing or considering how to drive from one place to another; this type of laziness can be especially pernicious because these thoughts and activities are not usually recognized as problems.
At other times, laziness manifests as distraction to thinking about nonvirtuous activities, such as an object of lust or how to pay an enemy back. Another type of laziness is the sense that you are inadequate to the task of meditation, feeling inferior and discouraged: "How could someone like me ever achieve this!" In this case you are failing to recognize the great potential of the human mind and the power of gradual training.
All of these forms of laziness involve being unenthusiastic about meditation. How can they be overcome? Contemplation of the advantages of attaining mental and physical flexibility will generate enthusiasm for meditation and counteract laziness. Once you have developed the meditative joy and bliss of mental and physical flexibility, you will be able to stay in meditation for as long as you want. At that time your mind will be completely trained so you can direct it to any virtuous activity; all dysfunctions of body and mind will have been cleared away.
How to See Yourself As You Really Are

Those whom we ordinarily consider to be our enemies can only be so for one lifetime, at the most. But negative emotions have been harming us from time without beginning. They are truly the worst of enemies.
There are always ways in which one can gradually make friends with an enemy. But the more we try to make friends with negative emotions the stronger they become and the more they are able to harm us. If we think about it, as long as they continue to inhabit our minds, staying with us like close friends, we will never be happy. As long as anger, pride, and jealousy are in our minds, we will always have external enemies. If we get rid of one enemy today, tomorrow another will appear. It is endless. While we may be able temporarily to free ourselves of enemies, with negative emotions entrenched in our minds, we shall never find lasting happiness.
Anyone who practices the Dharma has a duty to do battle with the enemy--negative emotions. If we wish to achieve ultimate happiness, we have to use the antidote [mindfulness] to fight against this enemy. In doing so, we may encounter difficulties from time to time. But in an ordinary war, the trials and difficulties people go through are accepted and even encourage them to fight harder against the enemy. Moreover, in the ordinary world, a warrior's wounds are considered as signs of bravery, like medals. So as practicing Buddhists fighting this real enemy, whose very nature is harm, we should expect difficulties, and treat them as signs of victory.
An ordinary enemy may escape to a safe place only to marshal his forces again and attack us once more. But once we have banished the negative emotions from our minds by using the true antidote, they have nowhere to hide and cannot return to harm us.
A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night: A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life

We know how comfort and reassurance can help dispel fear. Similarly, those forms of counseling which lead to greater awareness, and affection, can help alleviate depression.
The observation, that emotion and consciousness are not the same thing, tells us that we do not have to be controlled by our thoughts and emotions. Prior to our every action, there must be a mental and emotional event to which we are more or less free to respond, albeit that until we have learned to discipline our mind, we will have difficulty in exercising this freedom. How we respond to these events and experiences determines the moral content of our acts, generally speaking. In simple terms, this means that if we do so positively, keeping others' interests before us, our acts will be positive. If we respond negatively, neglecting others, our acts will be negative and unethical.
According to this understanding, we might think of mind, or consciousness, in terms of a president or monarch who is very honest, very pure. In this view, our thoughts and emotions are like cabinet ministers. Some of them give good advice, some bad. Some have the well-being of others as their principal concern, others only their own narrow interests. The responsibility of the main consciousness--the leader--is to determine which of these subordinates gives good advice and which bad, which of them are reliable and which are not, and to act on the advice of the one sort and not the other. Mental and emotional events which, in this sense, give bad advice can themselves be described as a form of suffering.
Ethics for the New Millennium

Delusions are states of mind which, when they arise within our mental continuum, leave us disturbed, confused and unhappy.
Therefore, those states of mind which delude or afflict us are called 'delusions' or 'afflictive emotions'

We all know that on days when we are in a good mood, when the whole world seems to be smiling at us, we can accept predicaments or bad news more easily than if our mind is already upset, frustrated or troubled, when the slightest incident might cause us to explode with negative emotions. If we make a habit of being governed by these negative emotions, we will lose our appetite, sleep badly, perhaps become ill, and lose a few years of our life as a result. So mental calmness is very important.
From Beyond Dogma - The Challenge of the Modern World

...to have greater self-awareness or understanding means to have a better grasp of reality. Now, the opposite of reality is to project onto yourself qualities that are not there, ascribe to yourself characteristics in contrast to what is actually the case. For example, when you have a distorted view of yourself, such as through excessive pride or arrogance, because of these states of mind, you have an exaggerated sense of your qualities and personal abilities. Your view of your own abilities goes far beyond your actual abilities. On the other hand, when you have low self-esteem, then you underestimate your actual qualities and abilities. You belittle yourself, you put yourself down. This leads to a complete loss of faith in yourself. So excess--both in terms of exaggeration and devaluation--are equally destructive. lt is by addressing these obstacles and by constantly examining your personal character, qualities, and abilities, that you can learn to have greater self-understanding. This is the way to become more self-aware."
The Art of Happiness at Work

Question: What is the relationship of the mind and afflictive emotions?
Dalai Lama: The very entity of the mind, its nature of mere luminosity and knowing, is not polluted by defilements; they do not abide in the entity of the mind. Even when we generate afflictive emotions, the very entity or nature of the mind is still mere luminosity and knowing, and because of this we are able to remove the afflictive emotions. If you agitate the water in a pond, it becomes cloudy with mud; yet the very nature of the water itself is not dirty. When you allow it to become still again, the mud will settle, leaving the water pure. How are defilements removed? They are not removed by outside action, nor by leaving them as they are; they are removed by the power of antidotes, meditative antidotes.
A Policy of Kindness

The nature of samsaric evolution is not such that death is followed by nothingness, nor that humans are always reborn as humans and insects as insects. On the contrary, we all carry within us the karmic potencies of all realms of cyclic existence. Many beings transmigrate from higher to lower realms, others from lower to higher. The selection of a place of rebirth is not directly in our own hands but is conditioned by our karma and delusions. They who possess spiritual understanding can control their destiny at the time of death, but for ordinary beings the process is very much an automatic chain reaction of karmic seeds and habitual psychic response patterns....
Our repeated experience of frustration, dissatisfaction and misery does not have external conditions as its root cause. The problem is mainly our lack of spiritual development. As a result of this handicap, the mind is controlled principally by afflicted emotions and illusions. Attachment, aversion and ignorance rather than a free spirit, love and wisdom are the guiding forces. Recognizing this simple truth is the beginning of the spiritual path.
The Path to Enlightenment

...In order to set the mind steadily on an object of observation, it is necessary initially to use an object of observation suited to counteracting your own predominant afflictive emotion, since its force remains with your mind now and can easily interrupt any attempt to concentrate the mind. Therefore, Buddha described many types of objects for purifying behavior:
For someone whose predominant afflictive emotion is desire, ugliness is a helpful object of meditation. Here, "ugliness" does not necessarily refer to distorted forms; the very nature of our body--composed of blood, flesh, bone, and so forth--might seem superficially to be very beautiful with a good color, solid and yet soft to touch, but when it is investigated, you see that its essence is quite different--substances like bone, blood, urine, feces, and so forth.
For someone who has predominantly engaged in hatred, the object of meditation is love.
For someone who was predominantly sunk in obscuration, the meditation is on the twelve links of the dependent-arising of cyclic existence because contemplating its complexity promotes intelligence.
For someone whose predominant afflictive emotion is pride, the meditation could be on the divisions of the constituents because, when meditating on the many divisions, you get to the point where you realize that there are many things you do not know, thereby lessening an inflated sense of yourself.
Those dominated by conceptuality can observe the exhalation and inhalation of the breath because, by tying the mind to the breath, discursiveness diminishes.
A particularly helpful object for all personality types is a Buddha body, since concentration on a Buddha's body causes your mind to mix with virtuous qualities. No matter what the object is, this is not a case of meditating within, looking at an external object with your eyes, but of causing an image of it to appear to the mental consciousness.
Yoga Tantra: Paths to Magical Feats

Many people who approach the practice of Buddhism are willing to sacrifice one or two hours of their day in order to perform some ritual practice or engage in meditation. Time is relatively easy to give up, even though their life may be very busy. But, they are not willing to change anything of their personality - they are not willing to forgo anything of their negative character. With this type of approach to Buddhism, it hardly matters how much meditation we do, our practice remains merely a hobby or a sport. It does not touch our lives. In order actually to overcome our problems, we have to be willing to change - namely to change our personality. We need to renounce and rid ourselves of those negative aspects of it that are causing us so much trouble.
The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra

Our practice of the Dharma should be a continual effort to attain a state beyond suffering. It should not simply be a moral activity whereby we avoid negative ways and engage in positive ones. In our practice of the Dharma, we seek to transcend the situation in which we all find ourselves: victims of our own mental afflictions- such as attachment, hatred, pride, greed, and so forth-are mental states that cause us to behave in ways that bring about all of our unhappiness and suffering. While working to achieve inner peace and happiness, it is helpful to think of them as our inner demons, for like demons, they can haunt us, causing nothing but misery. That state beyond such negative emotions and thoughts, beyond all sorrow, is called nirvana.
An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life

Why do you feel elated when praised and dejected when criticized?
It's because you don't accept the way things truly are.
You're controlled by your hallucinating mind, which is totally divorced from reality.

Your up and down emotions are like clouds in the sky; beyond them, the real, basic human nature is clear and pure.