So if you want to be beautiful for your own part, you should strive to achieve this, the excellence that characterizes a human being.
'But what is it?'
Consider who it is that you praise when you praise people dispassionately: is it those who are just, or unjust? - 'Those who are just.' - The temperate or the intemperate? - 'The temperate.' - The self-controlled or the dissolute? - 'The self-controlled.' - You should know, then, that if you make yourself a person of that kind, you'll be making yourself beautiful; but if you neglect these virtues, you're bound to be ugly, whatever techniques you adopt to make yourself appear beautiful.
- Epictetus, Discourses 3.1
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