THE ESSENTIAL PLOTINUS
Translated by Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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| 1 |
"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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| 2 |
"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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| 3 |
"Nothing hinders anything from sharing in the Good to the extent it is able." Plotinus, 'The Descent of the Soul'
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| 4 |
"Souls are responsive one to another because they all come from the same soul – The Soul." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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| 5 |
"The Good is the cause of life, of thought, of being." Plotinus, 'Beauty'
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| 6 |
"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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| 7 |
"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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| 8 |
"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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| 9 |
"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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| 10 |
"It is because of The One that we breathe and have our being." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 11 |
"It is by The One that all beings are beings." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 12 |
"The One, transcendent to all differentiation and form, is the source of all." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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| 13 |
"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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| 14 |
"What, then is The One? It is what makes all things possible. Without it nothing would exist." Plotinus, 'Contemplation'
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| 15 |
"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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| 16 |
"God is a living being, eternal, and infinitely good." Aristotle, 'Metaphysics'
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| 17 |
"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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| 18 |
"Plotinus sees bright shoots of everlastingness in all creation." Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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| 19 |
"No intelligible entity ever passes away. All it contains exists in an eternal present." Plotinus, 'The Three Primal Hypostases'
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| 20 |
"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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| 21 |
"The world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God." Plato, 'Timaeus'
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| 22 |
"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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| 23 |
"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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| 24 |
"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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"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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