Plotinus Quotes

Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.

Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.

You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.

Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe

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.

Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.

We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing...a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.

We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.

Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.

In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view; the vision is such that seeing and seen are one; object and act of vision have become identical.

It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.

Withdraw into yourself and look.

Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.

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.

We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order.

I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.

Become vision itself.

There is one and the same soul in many bodies.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.

One principle must make the universe a single complex living creature, one from all.

Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.

The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.

The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.

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.

The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.

It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me. Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?

If someone with the right conduct tries to attain to something that lies outside of it, is his goal not the right conduct.

Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.

Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.

Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.

Life here with the things of the earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing.

[O]ther thinkers have philosophised since the time of Plato, but that does not destroy the interest and beauty of his philosophy