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Plotinus QUOTES

Plotinus QUOTES

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

― Plotinus

2 " 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 Essential Plotinus

3 " This cause, therefore, of all existing things cannot be any one of them. "

― Plotinus , The Essential Plotinus

4 " When one has achieved the object of one's desires, it is evident that one's real desire was not the ignorant possession of the desired object but to know it as possessed--as actually contemplated, as within one. "

― Plotinus , The Essential Plotinus

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

― Plotinus

6 " One jests because one wants to contemplate. "

― Plotinus , The Essential Plotinus

7 " 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. "

― Plotinus

8 " Life is the flight of the alone to the alone. "

― Plotinus

9 " Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: 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. "

― Plotinus

10 " Withdraw into yourself and look. "

― Plotinus

11 " 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

12 " It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings. "

― Plotinus , The Enneads

13 " 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. "

― Plotinus , The Enneads

14 " 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 , The Enneads

15 " The world is knowable, harmonious, and good. "

― Plotinus

16 " The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company. "

― Plotinus , The Enneads

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

― Plotinus , The Enneads

18 " Self-knowledge reveals to the soul that its natural motion is not, if uninterrupted, in a straight line, but circular, as around some inner object, about a center, the point to which it owes its origin. "

― Plotinus

19 " To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense. "

― Plotinus , The Enneads

20 " 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 , The Enneads