Quotes from Plotinus

Next to this, we must consider the soul receiving its beauty from intellect

Knowledge has three degrees—opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second dialectic; of the third intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known.

The proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly, and given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms.

Il faut assigner le premier rang à la Beauté, qui est identique avec le Bien et dont dérive l'Intelligence qui est belle par elle-même.

Thus, with the good we have the bad: we have the opposed movements of a dancer guided by one artistic plan; we recognize in his steps the good as against the bad, and see that in the opposition lies the merit of the design.

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?

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

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

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

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.

Life here with the things of the earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing.

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

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

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.

The finite is the shadow of God.

Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

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

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.

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

The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.

True satisfaction is only for what has its plentitude in its own being; where craving is due to an inborn deficiency, there may be satisfaction at some given moment but it does not last.

This cause, therefore, of all existing things cannot be any one of them.

What do you experience on perceiving yourselves lovely within?