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Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful as yet, do as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful; he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line
lighter, this other purer, until he has shown a beautiful face upon his statue. So do you also; cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is shadowed, labour to make all glow with beauty, and do not cease chiselling your statue until there shall shine out on you the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall
see the final goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.
And, when you have become this perfect work and see that it and you are one, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining that can hinder your inner unity, nothing from without clinging to your inner self; when you find you are wholly yourself, wholly that Light which is the only true light - which is not measured by size, not narrowed by any circumscribed shape, nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but is wholly outside of measure as something
greater than all measure and above all quantity - when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now vision itself; call up your confidence, strike forward yet a step - you need a guide no longer - strain and see.
This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty. If the eye that undertakes the vision be dimmed by vice and unpurified, or weak and unable in its cowardly flinching to see the Uttermost Brightness, then it sees nothing, even though another point to what lies plain to see before it. To any vision must be brought an eye fitted to what is to be seen and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had become sun-like, and never can soul see Beauty unless itself be beautiful.
Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. Then, mounting, he will come on his upward way, first to Intelligence, and survey all the beautiful Ideas There, and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty, since all is beautiful by these, by the offspring and essence of Intelligence. And what he will see beyond this, we call the Nature of Good, that which carries Beauty as thrown out before It. So that, in the sum of the Intelligibles, the First is the Beautiful: if we discriminate among them, we call the Realm of Ideas the Intelligible Beauty, while the
Good, that which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty. Or we may make the Good and the Primal Beauty one and the same.
And thus, always, Beauty's seat is There.
~Plotinus~