Top 50 Plotinus Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.”

— Plotinus

2. “The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.”

— Plotinus

3. “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

4. “Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.”

— Plotinus

5. “Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.”

— Plotinus

6. “Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.”

— Plotinus

7. “Never stop working on your statue until the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, until you see self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat.”

— Plotinus

8. “Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.”

— Plotinus

9. “Never did 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.”

— Plotinus

10. “Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.”

— Plotinus

11. “Withdraw into yourself and look.”

— Plotinus

12. “Each one of us is part of the soul of the universe.”

— Plotinus

13. “The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.”

— Plotinus

14. “Become vision itself.”

— Plotinus

15. “There is one and the same soul in many bodies.”

— Plotinus

16. “All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.”

— Plotinus

17. “Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.”

— Plotinus

18. “We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.”

— Plotinus

19. “It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.”

— Plotinus

20. “God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.”

— Plotinus

21. “You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.”

— Plotinus

22. “Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.”

— Plotinus

23. “It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.”

— Plotinus

24. “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

25. “The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.”

— Plotinus

26. “Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful as yet, do as the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful; the sculptor cuts away here, smoothes there, makes this line lighter, this other purer, until he or she has shown a beautiful face upon the statue.”

— Plotinus

27. “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

28. “One principle must make the universe a single complex living creature, one from all.”

— Plotinus

29. “Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.”

— Plotinus

30. “He who has not even a knowledge of common things is a brute among men. He who has an accurate knowledge of human concerns alone, is a man among brutes. But he who knows all that can be known by intellectual energy is a God among men.”

— Plotinus

31. “I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.”

— Plotinus

32. “Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.”

— Plotinus

33. “In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view; the vision is such that seeing and seen are one; object and act of vision have become identical.”

— Plotinus

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

— Plotinus

35. “We must not run after it, but we must fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for it, as the eye waits on the rising of the Sun which in its own time appears above the horizon and gives itself to our sight.”

— Plotinus

36. “Those who believe that the world of being is governed by luck or chance and that it depends upon material causes are far removed from the divine and from the notion of the One.”

— Plotinus

37. “Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled; and this is just; the triumph of weaklings would not be just.”

— Plotinus

38. “Self-knowledge reveals to the soul that its natural motion is not, if uninterrupted, in a straight line, but circular, as around some inner object, about a center, the point to which it owes its origin.”

— Plotinus

39. “Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.”

— Plotinus

40. “We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order...”

— Plotinus

41. “Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.”

— Plotinus

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Knowledge has three degrees – opinion, science, illumination. THe means or instrument of the first s sense; of the second dialectic; of the third intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge found on the identity of the mind knowing with the object know.”

— Plotinus

46. “One jests because one wants to contemplate.”

— Plotinus

47. “It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me. Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?”

— Plotinus

48. “To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense.”

— Plotinus

49. “To set oneself above intellect is immediately to fall outside it.”

— Plotinus

50. “Every evildoer began by despising the Gods; and one not previously corrupt, taking to this contempt, even though in other respects not wholly bad, becomes an evildoer by the very fact.”

— Plotinus