Plotinus - Collected Quotes

"All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another." (Plotinus, "Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

"But if anyone despises the arts because they produce their works by imitating nature, we must tell him, first, that natural things are imitations too. Then he must know that the arts do not simply imitate what they see, but they run back up to the forming principles from which nature derives" (Plotinus, "Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

"Conscious apprehension seems to exist […] as happens in a mirror-image when the smooth and bright surface is peaceful." (Plotinus, "Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

“In the same way as regards the soul, when that kind of thing in us which mirrors the images of thought and intellect is undisturbed, we see them and know them in a way parallel to sense-perception, along with the prior knowledge that it is intellect and thought that are active. But when this is broken because the harmony of the body is upset, thought and intellect operate without an image, and then intellectual activity takes place without a mind-picture.” (Plotinus, “Enneads”, cca. 270 AD)

"On the assumption that all happens by Cause, it is easy to discover the nearest determinants of any particular act or state to trace it plainly to them." (Plotinus, "Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

"[...] so external sensation is the image of this perception of the soul, which is in its essence truer and is a contemplation of forms alone without being affected. From these forms, from which the soul alone receives its lordship over the living being, come reasonings, and opinions and noetic acts; and this is precisely where ‘we’ are." (Plotinus, "Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

"The noetic act is without parts and has not, so to speak, come out into the open, but remains unobserved within, but the verbal expression unfolds its content and brings it out of the noetic act into the image making power, and so shows the noetic act as if in a mirror, and this is how there is conscious apprehension and persistence and memory of it." (Plotinus, "Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

"Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself." (Plotinus)

"Knowledge has three degrees - opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition." (Plotinus)

"We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing […] a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use." (Plotinus)