Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
PLOTINUSThe 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.
More Plotinus Quotes
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Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.
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Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.
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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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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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Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.
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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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We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order.
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You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.
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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.
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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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Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.
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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.
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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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It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.
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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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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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Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.
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Never stop working on your statue until the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, until you see self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat.
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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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Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
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The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.
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The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.
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Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.
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Become vision itself.
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Life here with the things of the earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing.
PLOTINUS