Plotinus Quotations

Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.

If someone with the right conduct tries to attain to something that lies outside of it, is his goal not the right conduct.

The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.

A dogma recognized throughout antiquity... (that) the soul expiates its sins in the darkness of the infernal regions and... afterwards... passes into new bodies, there to undergo new trials.

Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending.

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.

It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.

Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.

It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me. Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?

Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.

The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.

Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine...

When we look outside of that on which we depend we ignore our unity; looking outward we see many faces; look inward and all is one head. If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.

Never stop working on your statue until the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, until you see self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat.

I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.

The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

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.

There is one and the same soul in many bodies.

One principle must make the universe a single complex living creature, one from all.

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....

Become vision itself.

Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.

Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.

It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.

Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.

Withdraw into yourself and look.

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.

We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order...

We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.

Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.

Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.

Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.

You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.

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.

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.

We must not run after it, but we must fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for it, as the eye waits on the rising of the Sun which in its own time appears above the horizon and gives itself to our sight.

Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe

Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.

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.

Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

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.