Plotinus Quotes

#1. We are not separate from spirit, we are within it." -Plotinus, ancient Greek Sage & Mystic

Sara Rider

#2. Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world back in the third century.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#3. Plotinus had been born in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century A.D. Like many brilliant critics, he thought he understood what he had read better than the author himself.

Paul Strathern

#4. As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.

James Hillman

#5. It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

William Butler Yeats

#6. But truth is not the only merit that a metaphysic can possess. It may have beauty, and this is certainly to be found in Plotinus; there are passages that remind one of the later cantos of Dante's Para- diso, and of almost nothing else in literature. Now

Bertrand Russell

#7. But how is this to be accomplished? "Cut away everything." The experience of "ecstasy" (standing outside one's own body) happened frequently to Plotinus: Many

Bertrand Russell

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

Plotinus

#9. The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.

Plotinus

#10. Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Plotinus

#11. Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe

Plotinus

#12. It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

#17. 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.

Plotinus

#18. Never did an 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.

Karen Amanda Hooper

#19. This All is universal power, of infinite extent and infinite in potency, a god so
great that all his parts are infinite. Name any place, and he is already there.

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

#21. 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; 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.

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

#23. 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.

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

#26. The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

#28. The world is finite, harmonious, and good.

Plotinus

#29. 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.

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

#32. 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.

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

#34. 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.

Plotinus

#35. 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.

Plotinus

#36. Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

Plotinus

#37. Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

#40. Those who believe that the world of being is governed by luck or chance and that it depends upon material causes are far removed from the divine and from the notion of the One.

Plotinus

#41. There is one and the same soul in many bodies.

Plotinus

#42. To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense.

Plotinus

#43. Self-knowledge reveals to the soul that its natural motion is not, if uninterrupted, in a straight line, but circular, as around some inner object, about a center, the point to which it owes its origin.

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

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

Plotinus

#46. Withdraw into yourself and look.

Plotinus

#47. The First, then, should be compared to light, the next [Spirit or Intellect] to the sun, and the third [soul] to the celestial body of the moon, which gets its light from the sun. (V-6-4)

Plotinus

#48. 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?

Plotinus

#49. 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. If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.

Plotinus

#50. 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.

Plotinus