Plotinus > Quotes

“I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.”
― Plotinus

“Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.”
― Plotinus

“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

“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

“Withdraw into yourself and look.”
― 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

“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

“The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“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

“The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.”
― 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 Essential Plotinus

“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

“Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot. ”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.”
― Plotinus

“He who has not even a knowledge of common things is a brute among men. He who has an accurate knowledge of human concerns alone, is a man among brutes. But he who knows all that can be known by intellectual energy is a God among men.”
― Plotinus

“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

“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

“Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled; and this is just; the triumph of weaklings would not be just.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“The First, then, should be compared to light, the next [Spirit or Intellect] to the sun, and the third [soul] to the celestial body of the moon, which gets its light from the sun. (V-6-4)”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“One jests because one wants to contemplate.”
― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus

“Those who believe that the world of being is governed by luck or chance and that it depends upon material causes are far removed from the divine and from the notion of the One.”
― Plotinus, Ennead VI, Books 6-9

“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

“Next to this, we must consider the soul receiving its beauty from intellect,”
― Plotinus, An Essay on the Beautiful From the Greek of Plotinus

“The world is finite, harmonious, and good.”
― Plotinus

“This All is universal power, of infinite extent and infinite in potency, a god so
great that all his parts are infinite. Name any place, and he is already there.”
― Plotinus

“The proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly, and given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“Knowledge has three degrees—opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second dialectic; of the third intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known.”
― Plotinus

“Thus, with the good we have the bad: we have the opposed movements of a dancer guided by one artistic plan; we recognize in his steps the good as against the bad, and see that in the opposition lies the merit of the design.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“True satisfaction is only for what has its plentitude in its own being; where craving is due to an inborn deficiency, there may be satisfaction at some given moment but it does not last.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads