The Enneads Quotes

“It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“When we look outside of that on which we depend we ignore our unity; looking outward we see many faces; look inward and all is one head. If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father; but coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot. ”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls. Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, not fenced off, integral to that All. [...] Then it was as if One voice sounded. One word was uttered and from every side an ear attended and received and there was an effective hearing; now we are become a dual thing, no longer that which we were at first, dormant, and in a sense no longer present.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“The First, then, should be compared to light, the next [Spirit or Intellect] to the sun, and the third [soul] to the celestial body of the moon, which gets its light from the sun. (V-6-4)”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled; and this is just; the triumph of weaklings would not be just.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“The proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly, and given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“Thus, with the good we have the bad: we have the opposed movements of a dancer guided by one artistic plan; we recognize in his steps the good as against the bad, and see that in the opposition lies the merit of the design.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“True satisfaction is only for what has its plentitude in its own being; where craving is due to an inborn deficiency, there may be satisfaction at some given moment but it does not last.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“Those incapable of thinking gravely read gravity into frivolties which correspond to their own frivolous nature.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“What, then, is the achieved Sage?
One whose Act is determined by the higher phase of the Soul.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“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?”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“The sphere of sense, the Soul in its slumber; for all of the Soul that is in body is asleep and the true getting-up is not bodily but from the body: in any movement that takes the body with it there is no more than passage from sleep to sleep, from bed to bed.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“(…) la partie irrationnelle de l’âme sera comme un homme qui vit près d’un sage ; il profite de ce voisinage, et ou bien il devient semblable à lui, ou bien il aurait honte d’oser faire ce que l’homme de bien ne veut pas qu’il fasse. Donc pas de conflit ; il suffit que la raison soit là ; la partie inférieure de l’âme la respecte et, si elle est agitée d’un mouvement violent, c’est elle-même qui s’irrite de ne pas rester en repos quand son maître est là, et qui se reproche sa faiblesse.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“That which is afraid is that which is capable of
being affected.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“Not even a God would have the right to deal a blow for the unwarlike: the law decrees that to come safe out of battle is for fighting men, not for those that pray. The harvest comes home not for praying but for tilling...we have no right to complain of the ignoble getting the richer harvest if they are the only workers in the fields, or the best.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“This is why we must break away towards the High: we dare not keep ourselves
set towards the sensuous principle, following the images of sense, or towards the
merely vegetative, intent upon the gratifications of eating and procreation; our life
must be pointed towards the Intellective, towards the Intellectual-Principle, to-
wards God.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“For the Soul is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath to the totality of
life: and each of us is an Intellectual Kosmos, linked to this world by what is lowest
in us, but, by what is the highest, to the Divine Intellect: by all that is intellective we
are permanently in that higher realm, but at the fringe of the Intellectual we are fet-
tered to the lower; it is as if we gave forth from it some emanation towards that
lower, or, rather some Act, which however leaves our diviner part not in itself
diminished.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“the acting force in the Sage is the Intellective Principle [the
diviner phase of the human Soul] which therefore is itself his presiding spirit or is
guided by a presiding spirit of its own, no other than the very Divinity.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“Because of the power and nature of Good, evil is not just evil; since it appeared of necessity, it is bound with certain beautiful chains, like prisoners bound with golden chains, hidden by these, so that, being like this, it is not seen by the gods, and human beings do not always have to look at evil. But whenever they look, they are accompanied by images of Beauty to recollect.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“the main need, the cry, of man’s nature is to become actually, as he is always potentially, Divine: all his faculties, images each of its next highest, culminate in the Intellectual-Principle or Intellective-Principle, the Intuitional or True-knowing Faculty; and his duty, or rather his happiness, his blessedness, his deepest inner voice, is to labour his entire being into identification with this, the Divine in him: through this inner Divine, in an ecstasy away from all the lower and, first, from all that links him to Matter, he may even in this life attain to the ‘possession’ of the God-head in an ineffable act of identification, becoming UNIATE, one with God, actually God, and foretasting the blessedness of the final Return after which he is for all the space of eternity to be with the Godhead, to be Divine, or to be God.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“There are those who are unarmed. But who has weapons, fights—there is no God who fights for those who are not in arms. The law requires that victory in war is to the brave, not to those who pray. It is just that the cowardly are dominated by the wicked.”
― Plotino, The Enneads