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.
PLOTINUSA 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.
More Plotinus Quotes
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Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
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Become vision itself.
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Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.
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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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Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.
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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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The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.
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I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.
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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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Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.
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It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me.
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In actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.
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Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too.
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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.
PLOTINUS -
In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view.
PLOTINUS