THE ESSENTIAL PLOTINUS
Translated by Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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| 1 |
"The cosmos is a living organism." Plotinus, 'The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being'
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| 2 |
"It is by The One that all beings are beings." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 3 |
"What could exist were it not one?" Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 4 |
"True knowledge of self and true knowledge of God are so intimately linked within the soul that, if the soul is purified of all that is not itself, it knows at one and the same time itself, and in itself, God." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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| 5 |
"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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| 6 |
"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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| 7 |
"The cosmos is ensouled….It is in The Soul, which bears it up, and shares in it wholly." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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| 8 |
"Every particular thing is linked to that divine being in whose likeness it is made." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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| 9 |
"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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| 10 |
"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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| 11 |
"The Good is the cause of life, of thought, of being." Plotinus, 'Beauty'
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| 12 |
"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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| 13 |
"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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| 14 |
"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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| 15 |
"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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| 16 |
"Things all contain a part of everything." Anaxagoras (ca. 460bce), 'Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers'
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| 17 |
"Awareness of The One comes to us…by a presence transcending knowledge." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 18 |
"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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| 19 |
"What, then is The One? It is what makes all things possible. Without it nothing would exist." Plotinus, 'Contemplation'
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| 20 |
"The world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God." Plato, 'Timaeus'
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| 21 |
"The Soul makes each being one by looking upon The One." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 22 |
"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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| 23 |
"No intelligible entity ever passes away. All it contains exists in an eternal present." Plotinus, 'The Three Primal Hypostases'
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| 24 |
"The soul is of the same nature as The Soul to which must be ascribed all that is vital and beautiful in the cosmos." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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"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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