Plotinus Quotes
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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.
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Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.
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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.
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Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.
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We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order.
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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.
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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.
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The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.
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It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.
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And this is the life of the Gods, and of Godlike men, a life without love of the world, a flight of the Alone to the Alone.
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Become vision itself.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.
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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.
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Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe
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I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.
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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.
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It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.
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Life here with the things of the earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing.
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Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.
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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.
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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.
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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.
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Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.
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There is one and the same soul in many bodies.
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Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.
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Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.
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You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.
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