Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls.
PLOTINUSKnowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.
More Plotinus Quotes
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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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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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Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.
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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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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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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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The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.
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One word was uttered and from every side an ear attended and received and there was an effective hearing.
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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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Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too.
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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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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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It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.
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Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?
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Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.
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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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Withdraw into yourself and look.
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Until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.
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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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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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Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.
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Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe
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Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
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In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view.
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The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.
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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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