Porphyry Quotes
234–305
Porphyry of Tyre (Πορφύριος, c. 234 – c. 305) was a Neoplatonic philosopher.
Also known as: Porphyry
Random Porphyry quote
14 quotes
The utility of a science which enables men to take cognizance of the travellers on the mind's highway, and excludes those disorderly interlopers, verbal fallacies, needs but small attestation.
Things essentially incorporeal, because they are more excellent than all body and place, are every where, not with interval, but impartibly.
Every good thing is gentle and consistent, progressing in good order and not going beyond what is right.
The fleshless diet contributes to health and to a suitable endurance of hard work in philosophy.
Soul, indeed, is a certain medium between an impartible essence, and an essence which is divisible about bodies.
Every body is in place; but nothing essentially incorporeal, or any thing of this kind, has any locality.
Not only can logos be seen in absolutely all animals, but in many of them it has the groundwork for being perfected.
How can we admit that the divine became an embryo, and that after its birth, it was wrapped in swaddling clothes, covered with blood, bile, and even worse things?
So people should abstain from other animals just as they should from the human.
I think that when friendship and perception of kinship ruled everything, no one killed any creature, because people thought the other animals were related to them.
The Pythagoreans made kindness to beasts a training in humanity and pity.
Incorporeal hypostases, in descending, are distributed into parts, and multiplied about individuals with a diminution of power; but when they ascend by their energies beyond bodies, they become united, and proceed into a simultaneous subsistence, through exuberance of power.
Animals are rational; in most of them logos is imperfect, but it is certainly not wholly lacking. So if, as our opponents say, justice applies to rational beings, why should not justice, for us, also apply to animals?
The soul is bound to the body by a conversion to the corporeal passions; and again liberated by becoming impassive to the body.
That which nature binds, nature also dissolves: and that which the soul binds, the soul likewise dissolves.