"Plotinus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the same type of experience as that described by Plotinus—"the life of the gods, and of divine and happy men"—but shorn of its needless degradation of the body and the senses, which, with Wordsworth are still and transcended, but remain as a foundation for all the rest. There is yet another and very significant ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Plotinus that he was ashamed of his body, and 'tis very likely he had good reason for it,—that his body was a bad servant, and he had not skill in dealing with the material world, as happens often to men of abstract intellect. ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... barrel-organs. For instance he wrote on "The Plurality of Worlds," and on the universal "Monad," a name familiar enough to the readers of Vestiges of Creation. He was a Pantheist, and, as Hallam says, borrowed all his theories from the eclectic philosophers, from Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and ultimately they were no doubt of Oriental origin. This is just what has been shown again and again to be the history of German Pantheism; it is a mere barrel-organ repetition of the Brahman metaphysics found in Hindu cosmogonies. Bruno's theory regarding ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... old chum, as he read it, "don't want to be disturbed to-day; sick, is he? I'd like to know who's to blame, if he isn't. Wishes me to bring my Shakspeare along;—it's a wonder he had not said Plotinus, or Jacob Boehme's 'Aurora'; they're more in his style. The deuse take that boy and his picture, Ned! What if we two fools have been playing too roughly with such plastic clay? I wish to-night were come and gone safely. I'll go see Dr. Thorne, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... eye could trace A new attraction and a nameless grace. Livy I saw, with dark invidious frown Listening with pain to Sallust's loud renown; And Pliny there, profuse of life I found, Whom love of knowledge to the burning bound Led unawares; and there Plotinus' shade, Who dark Platonic truths in fuller light display'd: He, flying far to 'scape the coming pest, Was, when he seem'd secure, by death oppressed; That, fix'd by fate, before he saw the sun, The careful sophist strove in vain to shun. Hortensius, Crassus, Galba, next ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... so, but what does she know of life—she has never lived. Why, she isn't even in the world with us, you see." A tender little laugh escaped her. "I've even seen her," she added gayly, "read Plotinus at her dressmaker's. She says he helps her to stand ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold in thy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblichus or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed with the ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... The educated classes had given up any honest and literal worship of the old gods. They were trying to excuse themselves for their lingering half belief in them, by turning them into allegories, powers of nature, metaphysical abstractions, as did Porphyry and Iamblichus, Plotinus and Proclus, and the rest of the Neo-Platonist school of aristocratic philosophers and fine ladies: but the lower classes still, in every region, kept up their own local beliefs and worships, generally of the most foul and brutal kind. The animal worship of Egypt among the lower ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... at their magical works of art? Are we ourselves such indifferent artists? Cornelius Agrippa, before he wrote his "Vanity of the Arts and Sciences," intended to reduce into a system and method the secret of communicating with spirits and demons.[198] On good authority, that of Porphyrius, Psellus, Plotinus, Jamblichus—and on better, were it necessary to allege it—he was well assured that the upper regions of the air swarmed with what the Greeks called daemones, just as our lower atmosphere is full of birds, our waters of fish, and our earth of insects. Yet this occult ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... protest is against the rule of the ignorant, the democratic principle applied to the amor intellectualis Dei. Rich and poor, learned and ignorant, all must accept, with humility, the teaching of the Master. Plotinus, he points out, was the schoolmaster who brought Augustine to Christ. The greatest of us has to learn. He who would teach should be a ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... may say, A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range Has Olympus for one pole, for t'other the Exchange; 550 He seems, to my thinking (although I'm afraid The comparison must, long ere this, have been made), A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian's gold mist And the Gascon's shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist; All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he's got To I don't (nor they either) exactly know what; For though he builds glorious temples, 'tis odd He leaves never a doorway ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... those of Plato and Aristotle bore fruit in later ages. When we come down to Plotinus the Neo-Platonist (204-269, A.D.), we have left the conception of the soul as a warm breath, or as composed of fine round atoms, far behind. It has become curiously abstract and incomprehensible. It is described as an immaterial substance This substance is, ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton |
