THE ESSENTIAL PLOTINUS
Translated by Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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| 1 |
"The imagination is a power that is, as it were, intellectual. Appetite and impulse are obedient to imagination and to reason." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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| 2 |
"Things all contain a part of everything." Anaxagoras (ca. 460bce), 'Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers'
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| 3 |
"So divine and precious is The Soul, be confident that, by its power, you can attain to divinity." Plotinus, 'The Three Primal Hypostases'
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| 4 |
"God is a living being, eternal, and infinitely good." Aristotle, 'Metaphysics'
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| 5 |
"As we turn towards The One, we exist to a higher degree, while to withdraw from it is to fall." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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"The One…is present to those who are prepared for it and are able to receive it, to enter into harmony with it, to grasp and to touch it by virtue of their likeness to it, by virtue of that inner power similar to and stemming from The One when it is in that state in which it was when it originated from The One. Thus will The One be 'seen' as far as it can become an object of contemplation." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 7 |
"The Soul makes each being one by looking upon The One." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 8 |
"The Good is the cause of life, of thought, of being." Plotinus, 'Beauty'
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| 9 |
"Within this world-in-little, man, the cyclic rhythm perceptible throughout the universe-at-large, the macrocosm, is recurrently portrayed." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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| 10 |
"What could exist were it not one?" Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 11 |
"Every particular thing is linked to that divine being in whose likeness it is made." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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| 12 |
"For Plotinus as for the Pythagoreans The One is, statically, the unity by which all number is intelligible, and, dynamically, the unity whence and whither all multiplicity moves." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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| 13 |
"By contemplation the mystic constructs his real self, achieves his authentic existence, quite as the contemplation of The Intelligence IS The Intelligence and the contemplation of The Soul IS The Soul." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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| 14 |
"The world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God." Plato, 'Timaeus'
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| 15 |
"As the genus contains all the species or as the whole contains all the parts, The Intelligence contains all beings." Plotinus, 'The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being'
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| 16 |
"To The One the soul must return: it is the law embedded in its ontological structure." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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| 17 |
"We are always around The One. If we were not, we would dissolve and cease to exist. Yet our gaze does not remain fixed upon The One. When we look at it, we then attain the end of our desires and find rest. Then it is that, all discord past, we dance an inspired dance around it." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 18 |
"Plotinus sees bright shoots of everlastingness in all creation." Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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| 19 |
"It is because of The One that we breathe and have our being." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 20 |
"What, then is The One? It is what makes all things possible. Without it nothing would exist." Plotinus, 'Contemplation'
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| 21 |
"Health is contingent upon the body's being coordinated in unity; beauty, upon the mastery of parts by The One; the soul's virtue, upon unification into one sole coherence." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 22 |
"There is at the core of every existing thing an ontic desire for what is lacking to its perfectness, and this perfectness it can find in its fullness solely within that which initially engendered it." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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| 23 |
"Souls are responsive one to another because they all come from the same soul – The Soul." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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| 24 |
"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. If the soul knows this, it will move around this center from which it came, will cling to it and commune with it as indeed all souls should….for divinity consists in being attached to the center." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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"The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace." Plato, 'Phaedrus'
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We are gathering together the primary insights of spirituality and bringing them together into one place.
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