What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

Although often attributed to Plutarch, this aphorism expresses a broadly Plutarchan (and more generally Greco-Roman moralist) idea: the decisive arena of human life is the inner one—character, judgment, and self-mastery—and outward circumstances are shaped by the quality of that inner governance. Read this way, the line suggests that durable change begins with reforming one’s perceptions and dispositions; once the mind is steadied, actions follow, relationships shift, and what seems like “reality” alters because we meet events differently and choose differently. It also implies a moral causality: inner virtue (or vice) tends to manifest in the external world through conduct and its consequences.