Plotinus Quotes
Withdraw into yourself and look.
It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.
Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.
Act is determined by the higher phase of the Soul.
Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.
Beauty is established in multitude when the many is reduced into one.
It is by participation of species that we call every sensible object beautiful
I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.
If a fire is to warm something else, must there be a fire to warm that fire?
What, then, must be the condition of that being, who beholds the beautiful itself?
God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that he is so.
God is not in a certain place, but wherever anything is able to come into contact with him there he is present.
Everyone therefore must become divine, and of godlike beauty, before he can gaze upon a god and the beautiful itself.
Let us, therefore, re-ascend to the good itself, which every soul desires; and in which it can alone find perfect repose.
There exists no single human being that does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing we hold to constitute happiness.
To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense.
 |
 |
All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.
At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates' soul remained in body; but Socrates ceases to exist, precisely on attainment of the highest.
Perhaps, the good and the beautiful are the same, and must be investigated by one and the same process; and in like manner the base and the evil.
For man, and especially the Proficient, is not the Couplement of Soul and body: the proof is that man can be disengaged from the body and disdain its nominal goods
We’re beautiful when we’re truly ourselves;
we’re beautiful when we know ourselves
All things and events are foreshown and brought into being by causes; but the causation is of two Kinds; there are results originating from the Soul and results due to other causes, those of the environment.
But humanity, in reality, is poised midway between gods and beasts, and inclines now to the one order, now to the other; some men grow like to the divine, others to the brute, the greater number stand neutral.
But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? Here surely is a contradiction; on the one side the Soul is above all guilt; on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation; it is doomed to the lower world, it passes from body to body.
The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father; but coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.
Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.
Every living thing is a combination of soul and body-kind: the celestial sphere, therefore, if it is to be everlasting as an individual entity must be so in virtue either of both these constituents or of one of them, by the combination of soul and body or by soul only or by body only.
No: the body has acquired life, it is the body that will acquire, with life, sensation and the affections coming by sensation. Desire, then, will belong to the body, as the objects of desire are to be enjoyed by the body. And fear, too, will belong to the body alone; for it is the body's doom to fail of its joys and to perish.
I am made by a God: from that God I came perfect above all forms of life, adequate to my function, self-sufficing, lacking nothing: for I am the container of all, that is, of every plant and every animal, of all the Kinds of created things, and many Gods and nations of Spirit-Beings and lofty souls and men happy in their goodness.
Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science.
