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.
PLOTINUSWe must not run after it, but we must fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for it.
More Plotinus Quotes
-
-
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.
PLOTINUS -
Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.
PLOTINUS -
Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
PLOTINUS -
The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.
PLOTINUS -
Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?
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 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.
PLOTINUS -
In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view.
PLOTINUS -
Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.
PLOTINUS -
Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, not fenced off, integral to that All. […] Then it was as if One voice sounded.
PLOTINUS -
It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me.
PLOTINUS -
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 -
Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?
PLOTINUS -
If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.
PLOTINUS -
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.
PLOTINUS