Plotinus Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.”
-- Plotinus -
“Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues....”
-- Plotinus -
“Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.”
-- Plotinus -
“The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.”
-- Plotinus -
“You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.”
-- Plotinus -
“I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.”
-- Plotinus -
“Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.”
-- Plotinus -
“Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.”
-- Plotinus -
“Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe”
-- Plotinus -
“Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.”
-- Plotinus -
“Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.”
-- Plotinus -
“We may treat of the Soul as in the body - whether it be set above it or actually within it - since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.”
-- Plotinus -
“We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.”
-- Plotinus -
“God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.”
-- Plotinus -
“We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing...a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.”
-- Plotinus -
“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.”
-- Plotinus -
“Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.”
-- Plotinus -
“It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.”
-- Plotinus -
“Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.”
-- Plotinus -
“Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls. Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, not fenced off, integral to that All. [...] Then it was as if One voice sounded. One word was uttered and from every side an ear attended and received and there was an effective hearing; now we are become a dual thing, no longer that which we were at first, dormant, and in a sense no longer present.”
-- Plotinus -
“In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view; the vision is such that seeing and seen are one; object and act of vision have become identical.”
-- Plotinus -
“We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order...”
-- Plotinus -
“Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful as yet, do as the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful; the sculptor cuts away here, smoothes there, makes this line lighter, this other purer, until he or she has shown a beautiful face upon the statue.”
-- Plotinus -
“There is one and the same soul in many bodies.”
-- Plotinus -
“Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.”
-- Plotinus -
“All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.”
-- Plotinus -
“The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.”
-- Plotinus