“The better you are yourself, the more kindly disposed you are to everything around you and to people”;

“Turn to yourself and look. If you do not yet see beauty in yourself, then do as the sculptor does with a statue that must become beautiful: he cuts away one part, polishes another, smooths one and cleans up another, until he has achieved his aim. In the same way you must cut away what is superfluous, straighten what is crooked, and, clearing away the dark, make it shine; and never stop working on your statue until the godlike radiance of virtue shines before you, until you see wisdom enthroned in its holy, pure majesty”;

“We are beautiful when we belong to ourselves, and ugly when we change into another nature: beautiful when we know ourselves, and ugly when we do not”;

“Happiness lies in the greatest fullness of life… But the full life, the true and most essential life, is the purely spiritual life. All other kinds of life are incomplete. They are only reflections of life, imperfect and impure… A person’s life is full when he lives by the laws of reason, or, better still, by the laws of the Spirit… That person is happy who has become this very life of the Spirit, who has managed to merge with it into a single whole”.

(Plotinus (AD 204/205–270) was an ancient idealist philosopher and the founder of Neoplatonism, a syncretic philosophical and religious doctrine. He systematised Plato’s teaching on the embodiment of the triad in nature and the cosmos. He defined the Godhead as an ineffable first principle that stands above all comprehension and generates the whole multiplicity of things by emanation. He sought to synthesise ancient polytheism with the idea of the One. He accepted the doctrine of metempsychosis (reincarnation, the transmigration of souls), on which he based his moral teaching on how to live. He worked out the soteriology of Neoplatonism — the theological doctrine of human salvation.)