THE ESSENTIAL PLOTINUS
Translated by Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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"What could exist were it not one?" Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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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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"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 |
"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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| 5 |
"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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| 6 |
"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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| 7 |
"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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| 8 |
"Plotinus sees bright shoots of everlastingness in all creation." Elmer O'Brien, S.J.
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| 9 |
"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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| 10 |
"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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| 11 |
"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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| 12 |
"The Good is the cause of life, of thought, of being." Plotinus, 'Beauty'
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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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"Souls are responsive one to another because they all come from the same soul – The Soul." Plotinus, 'The Soul'
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| 15 |
"The cosmos is a living organism." Plotinus, 'The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being'
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| 16 |
"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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"No intelligible entity ever passes away. All it contains exists in an eternal present." Plotinus, 'The Three Primal Hypostases'
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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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| 19 |
"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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"Nothing hinders anything from sharing in the Good to the extent it is able." Plotinus, 'The Descent of the Soul'
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| 21 |
"The One, transcendent to all differentiation and form, is the source of all." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator
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| 22 |
"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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| 23 |
"It is by The One that all beings are beings." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'
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"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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"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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