The quiet you feel after keeping a hard promise to yourself has a name. It's self-respect, and it doesn't need an audience.

The thought behind it

The work here is precision: calling the thing what it is instead of what it has been politely mistaken for. In Quiet Power restraint is the whole discipline, and it pays in a currency nobody else can see. Watch what “self-respect” does here. Change it and the sentence becomes comfortable again, which is how you know it matters.