32 Inspiring Quotes & Sayings By Plotinus
I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.
Withdraw into yourself and look.
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.
Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.
Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.
Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.
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...
Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe
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....
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.
You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.
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.
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.
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.
Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.
It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.
The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.
We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.
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.
It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.
Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.
We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order...
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.
Become vision itself.
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.
All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.
To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense.
The world is finite, harmonious, and good.
