If someone with the right conduct tries to attain to something that lies outside of it, is his goal not the right conduct.
PLOTINUSBeing is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.
More Plotinus Quotes
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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.
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Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
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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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Become vision itself.
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Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?
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A dogma recognized throughout antiquity… (that) the soul expiates its sins in the darkness of the infernal regions and… afterwards… passes into new bodies, there to undergo new trials.
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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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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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There is one and the same soul in many bodies.
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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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Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.
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All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.
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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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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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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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