THE ESSENTIAL PLOTINUS
Translated by Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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"The One, transcendent to all differentiation and form, is the source of all." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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"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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"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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"Nothing hinders anything from sharing in the Good to the extent it is able." Plotinus, 'The Descent of the Soul'
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"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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"The Good is the cause of life, of thought, of being." Plotinus, 'Beauty'
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"The Soul makes each being one by looking upon The One." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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"What could exist were it not one?" Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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"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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"What, then is The One? It is what makes all things possible. Without it nothing would exist." Plotinus, 'Contemplation'
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"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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"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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"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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"Plotinus sees bright shoots of everlastingness in all creation." Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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"God is a living being, eternal, and infinitely good." Aristotle, 'Metaphysics'
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"Things all contain a part of everything." Anaxagoras (ca. 460bce), 'Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers'
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"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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"The One is the foundation of all other things and gives them, at one and the same time, existence and location." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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"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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"Every particular thing is linked to that divine being in whose likeness it is made." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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"The cosmos is a living organism." Plotinus, 'The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being'
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"The world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God." Plato, 'Timaeus'
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"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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"Souls are responsive one to another because they all come from the same soul – The Soul." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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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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