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.
PLOTINUSMankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
More Plotinus Quotes
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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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It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.
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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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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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If someone with the right conduct tries to attain to something that lies outside of it, is his goal not the right conduct.
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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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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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Withdraw into yourself and look.
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The sculptor cuts away here, smoothes there, makes this line lighter, this other purer, until he or she has shown a beautiful face upon the statue.
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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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Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls.
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The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.
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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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It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me.
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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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The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.
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God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.
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Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.
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Become vision itself.
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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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Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.
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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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Life here with the things of the earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing.
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Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?
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Now we are become a dual thing, no longer that which we were at first, dormant, and in a sense no longer present.
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