The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.
PLOTINUSNature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.
More Plotinus Quotes
-
-
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.
PLOTINUS -
Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls.
PLOTINUS -
One principle must make the universe a single complex living creature, one from all.
PLOTINUS -
Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too.
PLOTINUS -
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.
PLOTINUS -
God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.
PLOTINUS -
Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?
PLOTINUS -
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.
PLOTINUS -
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 -
If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.
PLOTINUS -
Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
PLOTINUS -
You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.
PLOTINUS -
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.
PLOTINUS -
The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.
PLOTINUS -
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.
PLOTINUS