It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me.
PLOTINUSMankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
More Plotinus Quotes
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One principle must make the universe a single complex living creature, one from all.
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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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Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your 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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Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.
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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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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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The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.
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It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.
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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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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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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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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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Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe
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If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.
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