This is in a way the most important thing about soul is that it's a kind of principle which mediates between the universal intellect and the material world.

Your soul existed before your birth, your soul will exist after your death.

Plotinus is a neo-Platonist, so he would encourage us to go back to Plato.

When you're seeking after bodily pleasure of food and drink for example, this is going to prevent you from doing what you should be doing which is contemplating.

There's going to be this realm of Platonic forms and then there's going to be this single mind, the 'nous', which grasps them.

This condition of uncertainty and unrest in the Roman Empire might explain why at Plotinus' philosophy encourages us to sort of flee from the physical world and towards the world of ideas.

Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away.

In fact one of the things about Plotinus is that he maybe not singlehandedly, but I think more than anyone else, killed off the variety and dissension among the philosophical schools of antiquity.

We do each have an intellect but there's a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms.

We do have intellects and Plotinus controversially thought that even though we might not be aware of it, our souls are always connected to the intellect. They never fully descend as he would put it.

The body is some kind of image of you, it's kind of something that's just attached to your soul, some kind of outside principle, which doesn't really represent who you really are.

I would rather fail as an artist than succeed as anything else.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.

Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.

As a kid, before I could play music, I remember baseball being the one thing that could always make me happy.

My misfortune is my ability to see both sides even of the fundamental religious question.

Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.

We ought not to desire the impossible.

Space is the basic ingredient of the universe; there is more of it than anything else.

If our company is to survive and prosper, over the long term we must get our share of the youth market.

Art is the act of navigating without a map.