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.
PLOTINUSThe stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.
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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Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls.
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You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.
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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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Withdraw into yourself and look.
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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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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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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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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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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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The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.
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Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
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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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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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In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view.
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We must not run after it, but we must fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for it.
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Knowledge has three degrees–opinion, science, illumination.
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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.
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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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Become vision itself.
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Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe
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I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.
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Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
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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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Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.
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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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