Anthologia: Quotes of the Sages

“When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive – neither creating nor preserving nor destroying – I call Him Brahman or Purusha, the Impersonal God. When I think of Him as active – creating, preserving and destroying – I call Him Shakti or Maya or Prakriti, the Personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The Personal and Impersonal are the same thing, like milk and its whiteness, the diamond and its luster, the snake and its wriggling motion. It is impossible to conceive of one without the other. The Divine Mother and Brahman are one” - Ramakrishna

Christ is the Logos of whom the whole race of men partake. Those who lived according to the Logos are Christians, even if they were considered atheists, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates, and Heraclitus. - Justin Martyr

This collection of quotations is meant to help stir the heart, mind, and soul. To help you recognize the transmission of light, the Logos, as it has been appearing throughout history.

The One is all things and none whatsoever. – Plotinus

The Greater in the all is entirely harmless. – Porphyry

The universe is always happy, and our soul will likewise be happy, when it is assimilated to the universe; for thus it will be led back to its cause. – Proclus

Almighty Jupiter, sovereign of all things, and of all the Gods; Father and mother of the Gods; himself the only God, in himself, all Gods. -Varro

Jove, Pluto, Phœbus, Bacchus, all are One. -Orpheus

We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything [created]. Literally God is not, because He transcends being. —John Scotus Erigena

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

“Life is the flight of the alone to the alone.”
― Plotinus

“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

“Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.”
― Plotinus

“Withdraw into yourself and look.”
― Plotinus

“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

“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

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

“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, The Essential Plotinus

“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

“The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.”
― Plotinus

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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, Ennead VI, Books 6-9

“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.”
― 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

“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

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

“This All is universal power, of infinite extent and infinite in potency, a god so great that all his parts are infinite. Name any place, and he is already there.”
― Plotinus

“Next to this, we must consider the soul receiving its beauty from intellect.”
― Plotinus, An Essay on the Beautiful From the Greek of 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. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known.”
― Plotinus

“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

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

“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

“What do you experience on perceiving yourselves lovely within?”
― Plotinus, An Essay on the Beautiful From the Greek of Plotinus

“True satisfaction is only for what has its plenitude 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

“For at this point one would arrive at the act of thinking of it (evil, i.e. κακως) as if to be disproportion in regards to proportion, and limitlessness in regards to limit, formlessness in regards to the one-shaping-the-forms, always wanting in self-sufficiency, always indefinite, nowhere having a place to situate itself, wholly passive, insatiable absolute poverty.”
― Plotinus

“Attention to trifles is inconsistent with great genius of every kind.”
― Plotinus, An Essay on the Beautiful From the Greek of Plotinus

“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

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

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

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

“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

“Knowledge has three degrees—opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, logic; of the third, insight.”
― Plotinus

“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.”
― 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, towards God.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“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

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

“To see the supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that which illuminates the Soul is that which is to see.”
― Plotinus

“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.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“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

“Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.”
― Plotinus, The Essence of Plotinus: Extracts from the Six Enneads and Porphyry's Life of Plotinus

“There are those who are unarmed. But who has weapons, fights. There is no God who fights for those who are not in arms.”
― Plotinus, Ennead III

“But how are you to see into a virtuous Soul and know its loveliness? Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.”
― Plotinus

“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.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“To see the supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that which illuminates the Soul is that which is to see.”
― Plotinus

“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

“The main need, the cry, of man’s nature is to become actually, as he is always potentially, Divine: all his faculties culminate in the Intellectual-Principle, and his happiness is to labor his entire being into identification with this, the Divine in him.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads

“For the life it leads is dark with evil, sunk in manifold death. It sees no longer what the soul should see. It can no longer rest within itself but is forever being dragged towards the external, the lower, the dark.”
― Plotinus

“God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.”
― Empedocles, Empedocles: The Extant Fragments

“No mortal thing has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration; there is only a mixing and then separating of what was mixed, but by mortal men these processes are named 'beginnings.'”
― Empedocles, The Fragments of Empedocles

“Many fires burn below the surface.”
― Empedocles

“The force that unites the elements to become all things is Love, also called Aphrodite; Love brings together dissimilar elements into a unity, to become a composite thing. Love is the same force that human beings find at work in themselves whenever they feel joy, love, and peace. Strife, on the other hand, is the force responsible for the dissolution of the one back into its many, the four elements of which it was composed.”
― Empedocles

“It was not the mixture, O men, of blood and breath that made the beginning and substance of your souls, though your earthborn and mortal body is framed of those things. But your soul has come hither from another place.”
― Empedocles

“Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil; then are they borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what they dream they know is but the little each hath stumbled on in wandering about the world; yet boast they all that they have learned the whole—vain fools! For what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man. Thou, then, since thou hast fallen to this place, shalt know no more than human wisdom may attain.”
― Empedocles

“[i]νυκτὸς ἐρεμαίης ἀλαώπιδος...[/i]
Of night, the lonely, with her sightless eyes.”
― Empedocles, The Fragments of Empedocles