"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."
"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."
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Source: Plotinus, Thomas Taylor, Synesius Cyrenensis (1817). “Select works ¬of ¬Plotinus, ...: and extracts from the treatise of Synesius On Providence : Translated from the greek ; with an introduction containing the substance of Porphyry's life of Plotinus”, p.492
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"Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself."
"Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition."
"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."
"Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts."
"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."