Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?
PLOTINUSIt is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me.
More Plotinus Quotes
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The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.
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Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.
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Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
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Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.
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In actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.
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Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, not fenced off, integral to that All. […] Then it was as if One voice sounded.
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If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.
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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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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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Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?
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The vision is such that seeing and seen are one; object and act of vision have become identical.
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