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Plotinus Quotes
204–270 Egypt
Plotinus [Πλωτῖνος] (c. 204/205–270) was a major philosopher of the ancient world who is widely considered the founder of Neoplatonism (along with his teacher Ammonius Saccas). His metaphysical writings have inspired centuries of Pagan, Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Gnostic metaphysicians and mystics.
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Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?
The First Ennead (250)
Let us, therefore, re-ascend to the good itself, which every soul desires; and in which it can alone find perfect repose.
All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.
The First Ennead (250)
It is by participation of species that we call every sensible object beautiful.
What, then, must be the condition of that being, who beholds the beautiful itself?
Perhaps, the good and the beautiful are the same, and must be investigated by one and the same process; and in like manner the base and the evil.
Withdraw into yourself and look.
The First Ennead (250)
From the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a handyman does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.
...such a one is agitated with a salutary astonishment; is affected with the highest and truest love; derides vehement affections and inferior loves, and despises the beauty which he once approved.
It is now time, leaving every object of sense far behind, to contemplate, by a certain ascent, a beauty of a much higher order; a beauty not visible to the corporeal eye, but alone manifest to the brighter eye of the soul, independent of all corporeal aid.
The sensitive eye can never be able to survey, the orb of the sun, unless strongly endued with solar fire, and participating largely of the vivid ray. Everyone therefore must become divine, and of godlike beauty, before he can gaze upon a god and the beautiful itself.
Hence, as Narcissus, by catching at the shadow, plunged himself in the stream and disappeared, so he who is captivated by beautiful bodies, and does not depart from their embrace, is precipitated, not with his body, but with his soul, into a darkness profound and repugnant to intellect (the higher soul), through which, remaining blind both here and in Hades, he associates with shadows.
The First Ennead (250)
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