PLOTINUS


The Enneads

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Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly

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The soul is an image of the intelligible world, and it contains within itself the forms of all things.

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And this is the life of the Gods, and of Godlike man, a life without love of the world, a flight of the Alone tot he Alone.

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Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

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The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.

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The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company

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He who has not even a knowledge of common things is a brute among men. He who has an accurate knowledge of human concerns alone, is a man among brutes. But he who knows all that can be known by intellectual energy is a God among men.

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Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled; and this is just; the triumph of weaklings would not be just.

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A gang of lads, morally neglected, and in that respect inferior to the intermediate class, but in good physical training, attack and throw another set, trained neither physically nor morally, and make off with their food and their dainty clothes. What more is called for than a laugh?

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I ask myself in bewilderment, how on earth did I ever come down here, and how ever did my soul come to be enclosed in a body, being such as it has revealed itself to be, even while in a body?

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