The inner sculptor
Do not add to yourself; cut away what is not you.
tells the soul that seeks beauty to "withdraw into yourself and look"; and if you do not yet find yourself beautiful, to do as the sculptor of a statue does: cut away the excess, straighten what is crooked, never ceasing to work on your own statue. Self-shaping here is subtractive: not piling on new qualities or roles, but removing the superfluous, the borrowed, the distorted, until your own form shows through. Today it reframes the wish to improve, away from endless accumulation and toward the patient clearing of what clutters and disfigures who you already are.
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Source: Plotinus
- Can one learn to be good? — Can goodness be taught, like a body of knowledge, or is it acquired through habit? And how is it that we sometimes know the good yet fail to do it?