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.

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.

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.

The body distracts your soul.

I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

If you do not completely accept yourself, you can not love yourself fully. It would be hard to love anything unconditionally.

Every painting I've ever done has like 100 paintings under it.

Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God, I'm still alive.' But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.

Not if I know myself at all.

Imitation is always insult--not flattery.

Here is what we have to offer you in its most elaborate form -- confusion guided by a clear sense of purpose.

I would like to direct in the future, but I am in no hurry with that.

Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.

Somebody will come backstage and go, 'You saved me.' And I will have to say, 'Stop right there. You saved yourself.'