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