Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.
PLOTINUSBut 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.
More Plotinus Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls.
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Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
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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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In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view.
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I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.
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Knowledge has three degrees–opinion, science, illumination.
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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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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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Become vision itself.
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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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As the eye waits on the rising of the Sun which in its own time appears above the horizon and gives itself to our sight.
PLOTINUS






