Quotes from Plotinus

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

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

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

Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.

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.

Withdraw into yourself and look.

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.

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.

It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.

The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.

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.

The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company.

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

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.

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

Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls. Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, not fenced off, integral to that All. [...] Then it was as if One voice sounded. One word was uttered and from every side an ear attended and received and there was an effective hearing; now we are become a dual thing, no longer that which we were at first, dormant, and in a sense no longer present.

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

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)

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.

Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled; and this is just; the triumph of weaklings would not be just.

When one has achieved the object of one's desires, it is evident that one's real desire was not the ignorant possession of the desired object but to know it as possessed--as actually contemplated, as within one.

He who has not even a knowledge of common things is a brute among men. He who has an accurate knowledge of human concerns alone, is a man among brutes. But he who knows all that can be known by intellectual energy is a God among men.

The world is finite, harmonious, and good.

One jests because one wants to contemplate.