When we look outside of that on which we depend we ignore our unity; looking outward we see many faces; look inward and all is one head.
PLOTINUSIf a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.
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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If someone with the right conduct tries to attain to something that lies outside of it, is his goal not the right conduct.
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You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.
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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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The vision is such that seeing and seen are one; object and act of vision have become identical.
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Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.
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All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.
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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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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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If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.
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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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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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It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.
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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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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.
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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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The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.
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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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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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The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.
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Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.
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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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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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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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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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