Plotinus Quotes

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

The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.

The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.

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

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

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

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; 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.

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

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

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.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

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

We must not run after it, but we must fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for it, 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.

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

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

Withdraw into yourself and look.

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.

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, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

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

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.

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

Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.

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.

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.