Plotinus Quotes

“One jests because one wants to contemplate.”
― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus

“When one has achieved the object of one's desires, it is evident that one's real desire was not the ignorant possession of the desired object but to know it as possessed--as actually contemplated, as within one.”
― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus

“This cause, therefore, of all existing things cannot be any one of them.”
― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus

“Fusing the doctrines of Plotinus and Proclus with the creeds and beliefs of Christianity, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite combined the Neo-Platonic conviction of the fundamental oneness and luminous aliveness of the world with the Christian dogmas of the triune God, original sin and redemption. The universe is created, animated and unified by the perpetual self-realization of what Plotinus had called "the One," what the Bible had called "the Lord," and what he calls "the superessential Light.”
― erwin panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts

“Never did an eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.”
― Karen Amanda Hooper, Tangled Tides

“The force that we invoke in The Way of Power IS the energy behind all manifestation. Another name for this energy is the 'Ontos' or the Essence of essences. The Ontos is the essential nature of anything. Plotinus, a Roman philosopher born in Egypt in 205 C.E., called this energy the First Hypostasis (literally, to cause to stand). What stands? The erection (the Point). What causes the erection? The Triangle (The Source of Mystery - Woman - that which causes to stand).”
― Laurence Galian, Beyond Duality: The Art of Transcendence

“Plotinus (A.D. 205-270) was not a Christian, but his influence on Christian mystics was enormous; he compared human beings to the choir standing around a choir master but with their attention distracted by things going on about them, so they fail to sing in tune or in time. He held that creation was a series of steps leading away from the One (or God); he called those steps emanations. (The Kabbalists later borrowed his ideas, as William Blake was to borrow from the Kabbalah.) This is definitely a non-Christian view, for Plotinus’s evil is a negative thing, depending upon how many steps you have taken away from the One; it is like someone walking away from a lighted house at night, moving further into the darkness of the garden. But why should people walk away, unless tempted by the Devil? Because, says Plotinus, we are empty-headed, and easily distracted. The philosopher is the man who determinedly ignores distractions and multiplicity, and tries to see back towards the One. ‘Such,’ he concludes, ‘is the life of gods and of godlike men; a liberation from all earthly bonds, a life that takes no pleasure in earthly things, a flight of the alone to the alone.”
― Colin Wilson, The Occult

“They have been instructed by nature and the sacred laws to serve the living God, who is superior to the good, and more simple than the one, and more ancient than the unit; with whom, however, who is there of those who profess piety that we can possibly compare?”
― Philo of Alexandria, The Works of Philo

“Matter is nonexistent except as something we see and experience as matter by our senses. Matter is only a manifestation of a Universal Mind. The primary quality of matter and all existence is not accessible directly or indirectly except by pure thought (intuition). All qualities, described by some major philosophers as primary and secondary qualities, I understand only as different modes of existence and relationships between the sensed or perceptible and different modes of perceptibility or perceptions (and senses) of the beings possessing these abilities. These qualities represent different levels (manifestations) of matter (existence and life) and do not disclose the actual nature either of matter or true primary quality, the underlying reality of all, which to me is only something I chose to call a Universal Mind. This Universal Mind, in some ways, may correspond to Plato’s (or Kant’s) noumenon, to Aristotle’s aether in a way, to Parmenides' Mind (Oneness), to Anaxagoras' nous (except that there were no things mixed up together before the mind or nous arranged them; instead the “things” are only potential or the transformed mind, manifestation of a mind), and to Plotinus’ ideas of a mind of this kind. Heidegger states that philosophy, since Plato, has neglected the idea and the Being itself and forgot to ask what it is.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“According to Plotinus (c. 204/5—270 CE), God is Intelligence or Mind (Nous), and the world is created out of God (ex deo) and not from nothing (ex nihilo). “The power of the One is to provide a foundation (arkhe) and location (topos) for all existents. The foundation provided by the One is intelligence. The location in which the cosmos takes objective shape and determinate, physical, form is the soul.” … “The being of intelligence is thought, and the thought of intelligence is Being.” … “No idea is different from intelligence but is itself intelligence.” Plotinus accepted the Stoic’s idea of logoi spermatikoi; for him, logoi spermatikoi is a bridge between the soul and the material.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“That the matter originated just by itself or was always "there" in the form of "energy" and organized itself into superbly sophisticated organisms forming the Universe borders on insanity. We can, perhaps, all (both atheists and those who believe in a higher source) agree that there always was Something. The question is how we define this Something. It is much easier to prove that the Something always existed than to prove the opposite. Scientists can deal with this Something more easily because, moving back, step by step, scientists will come to nothing. When they come to nothing, the "spotless spot" before the Big Bang, they will have to scientifically explain how all the reality, the whole of what we think the "Universe" is, was contained within an immeasurable "spotless spot." Once they find the answer, they will understand that this "spotless spot" from which everything originated is immaterial and spaceless. This immaterial Being is the Creator of all reality and is the reality itself. Plotinus would call this reality intelligence or mind.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE