Plotinus (Image: Wikipedia)
There was a philosopher who refused to let anyone paint his portrait. He didn’t even tell people his birthday. The reason was strange and striking. He was almost embarrassed to have a body at all, and saw no point in celebrating the day of his arrival.
His name was Plotinus, and he lived in the Roman world nearly 1,800 years ago. He spent his whole life chasing one idea: that the true self is not the body, but the soul. The quote above is one of his most famous lines. It may seem simple, but it points to one of the boldest ideas in all of philosophy. Here’s what it really means.
Today’s quote is from Plotinus
“Purifying the soul is simply allowing it to be alone. It is pure when you are not accompanied.”
Who is Plotinus?
Plotinus was born around 204 or 205 AD, most likely in Egypt, which was then part of the Roman Empire.
Today he is remembered as the founder of a school of thought called Neoplatonism. In plain terms, this means that he took the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who lived about 500 years ago, and reconstructed them into something deeper and more spiritual.When he was a young man, he went to the great city of Alexandria to study. There he found a teacher named Ammonius Sakas, and he stayed with him for about 11 years. Those long apprenticeships shaped everything that came after.
Plotinus was also curious about the wider world. At some point, he joined a Roman military expedition heading east, partly because he hoped to learn about the philosophies of Persia and India. The campaign collapsed and the emperor who led it was killed. Plotinus barely escaped with his life. Soon after, at the age of about forty, he settled in Rome and began teaching. He spent the rest of his days there.
The man who wanted to leave the body behind
To understand the quote, it helps to understand the type of man who wrote it.Plotinus lived a very simple and disciplined life. Eat a little. He slept little. He was a vegetarian at a time when that was unusual. Much of what we know about him comes from his devoted student Porphyry, who later wrote a short account of his teacher’s life.According to Porphyry, Plotinus seemed almost ashamed of living in a physical body. That’s why he refused to sit for the photo. He felt that the body was just a temporary shell, a fleeting image of the real person, not worth replicating in paint or marble.But here’s the surprising part. He was not a cold or selfish hermit. People trusted him completely. The wealthy families in Rome asked him to take care of their orphaned children and manage their money and property. They knew he was honest and would not deceive anyone. This was a man with his head in the sky, but his feet still planted in everyday life. He cared about real people while thinking about eternal things.
What does the quote by Plotinus actually mean
Now to the quote itself. On first reading, it sounds like advice to avoid people and stay alone.
This is not exactly what Plotinus meant.For him, the soul was the true center of man. But in everyday life, it was believed that the soul becomes crowded and chaotic. It is filled with noise, with desires, with fears, with endless images and distractions pouring in from the outside world. He saw that all this pulls the soul away from itself.The full version of his script makes this even clearer. He said that the soul is pure when it is not accompanied, when it does not think strange thoughts, and when it stops chasing every fleeting image.
In other words, purifying oneself means removing clutter. It means allowing oneself to return to its calm, simple, and undivided nature.So the “company” he warns against is not actually other human beings. It is the mental crowd. Constant chatter inside the head. The endless desire and reaction that never allows the mind to settle.
Why “alone” does not mean lonely
This is the part that people often get wrong, so it’s worth taking it slow.When Plotinus talks about loneliness, he is not describing loneliness or sadness.
It describes a kind of inner stillness, a state in which the soul is whole and at peace with itself. He believed that everything in existence stems from a single source, which he simply called the One. The goal of human life, in his view, is for the soul to find its way to that source.He summed this up in one of the most beautiful phrases in philosophy. He described the spiritual journey as “the escape of the one to the one.”
The lonely soul travels back toward the one source of all things. Being alone, for Plotinus, was not emptiness. It was the deepest connection possible.This is a very different idea from the way we usually think about isolation. Most of us treat loneliness as something to escape from. Plotinus treated it as something to be attained.
How the quote survived
We should pause to ask how the words of a third-century man reached us at all.Plotinus did not write strictly for an audience. He wrote dense, difficult notes, often with poor eyesight and without bothering to revise.
After his death in 270 AD, his student Porphyry took on a huge task. He collected all of his teacher’s scattered writings and organized them into one great work.Porphyry has arranged the material into six groups, with nine messages in each group. The Greek word for nine is ennea, which is why the group was called the Enneads. Without this careful editing, these ideas may have been lost forever. Instead, they continued to shape Christian thinkers, Islamic philosophers, and Sufis for more than a millennium.So the quote you are reading today exists only because the devoted student refused to let his teacher’s thoughts disappear.
Why this quote still makes sense today
You might think that the 1,800-year-old idea of purifying the soul has no relevance to modern life. In fact, it seems almost uncomfortably fitting.Think about how you feel right now on a typical day. The phone is ringing. Notifications are piling up. There are messages to respond to, videos to scroll through, opinions to respond to, and hundreds of little concerns vying for attention.
The mind rarely gets a moment of calm. This is exactly the kind of crowded soul described by Plotinus, with only the addition of screens.His advice, stripped of its archaic language, is something a modern wellness coach might say. to retreat. Turn off the noise. Stop feeding the mind with endless images and reactions. Give yourself space to simply be, without the company of constant distractions.The difference is that Plotinus was not seeking relaxation or productivity.
He believed that true clarity, and even a glimpse of the divine, could only come when the soul was still. Calm was not the ultimate goal. It was the doorway to something much bigger.
What can Plotinus teach us about being alone in a noisy world?
Plotinus lived his beliefs to the end. In his last years he fell seriously ill, and one by one his friends and students turned away from his side. He spent his last days in the countryside, far from the busy life of Rome, very alone.Porphyry recorded what were said to be his teacher’s last words.
Plotinus told those around him that he was trying to return the divine in himself to the divine in everything. And even at the end, his mind was turning inward and upward, toward that one source which he had spent his life describing.It is a calm and powerful image. A man slips away into solitude, not afraid of being alone, but ultimately feeling completely at peace with it. This was the whole point of his philosophy.Which leaves a simple question for the rest of us, surrounded by noise, screens and endless company. When was the last time you allowed your mind to be truly alone, and what would you hear if you finally did?
