The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it.

Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.

This condition of uncertainty and unrest in the Roman Empire might explain why at Plotinus' philosophy encourages us to sort of flee from the physical world and towards the world of ideas.

The forms are part of the mind, or really are the mind, they're just the contents of this universal night.

Your soul existed before your birth, your soul will exist after your death.

Who you really are, is an immaterial soul and the body is an external thing that's sort of an encrustation your soul. So this has important implications for Plotinus' ethics, because his ethics are basically all about encouraging us to turn away from the body and turn towards these higher principles, so universal soul, universal intellect and ultimately the One.

Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away.