THE ESSENTIAL PLOTINUS
Translated by Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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| 1 |
"Nothing hinders anything from sharing in the Good to the extent it is able." Plotinus, 'The Descent of the Soul'
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| 2 |
"What, then is The One? It is what makes all things possible. Without it nothing would exist." Plotinus, 'Contemplation'
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| 3 |
"It is because of The One that we breathe and have our being." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 4 |
"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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| 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 |
"God is a living being, eternal, and infinitely good." Aristotle, 'Metaphysics'
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| 7 |
"It is by The One that all beings are beings." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 8 |
"Awareness of The One comes to us…by a presence transcending knowledge." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 9 |
"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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| 10 |
"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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| 11 |
"Every particular thing is linked to that divine being in whose likeness it is made." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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| 12 |
"The Soul makes each being one by looking upon The One." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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| 13 |
"No intelligible entity ever passes away. All it contains exists in an eternal present." Plotinus, 'The Three Primal Hypostases'
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| 14 |
"The One, transcendent to all differentiation and form, is the source of all." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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| 15 |
"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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| 16 |
"Souls are responsive one to another because they all come from the same soul – The Soul." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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| 17 |
"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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| 18 |
"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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| 19 |
"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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| 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 |
"Things all contain a part of everything." Anaxagoras (ca. 460bce), 'Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers'
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| 22 |
"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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| 23 |
"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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| 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 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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