Many / One

A database of 11,000+ illuminated guiding quotations in 40 categories from 600+ inspired books by our most brilliant and influential authors.
Compiled by JoAnn Kite

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1		"It is because of The One that we breathe and have our being." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

2		"Things all contain a part of everything." Anaxagoras (ca. 460bce), 'Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers'

3		"The soul is of the same nature as The Soul to which must be ascribed all that is vital and beautiful in the cosmos." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator

4		"The One is the foundation of all other things and gives them, at one and the same time, existence and location." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

5		"For Plotinus as for the Pythagoreans The One is, statically, the unity by which all number is intelligible, and, dynamically, the unity whence and whither all multiplicity moves." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator

6		"God is a living being, eternal, and infinitely good." Aristotle, 'Metaphysics'

7		"As we turn towards The One, we exist to a higher degree, while to withdraw from it is to fall." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

8		"Health is contingent upon the body's being coordinated in unity; beauty, upon the mastery of parts by The One; the soul's virtue, upon unification into one sole coherence." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

9		"Plotinus sees bright shoots of everlastingness in all creation." Elmer O'Brien, S.J.

10		"The cosmos is a living organism." Plotinus, 'The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being'

11		"So divine and precious is The Soul, be confident that, by its power, you can attain to divinity." Plotinus, 'The Three Primal Hypostases'

12		"What could exist were it not one?" Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

13		"The Good is the cause of life, of thought, of being." Plotinus, 'Beauty'

14		"By contemplation the mystic constructs his real self, achieves his authentic existence, quite as the contemplation of The Intelligence IS The Intelligence and the contemplation of The Soul IS The Soul." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator

15		"What, then is The One? It is what makes all things possible. Without it nothing would exist." Plotinus, 'Contemplation'

16		"Every particular thing is linked to that divine being in whose likeness it is made." Plotinus, 'The Soul'

17		"The One…is present to those who are prepared for it and are able to receive it, to enter into harmony with it, to grasp and to touch it by virtue of their likeness to it, by virtue of that inner power similar to and stemming from The One when it is in that state in which it was when it originated from The One. Thus will The One be 'seen' as far as it can become an object of contemplation." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

18		"The cosmos is ensouled….It is in The Soul, which bears it up, and shares in it wholly." Plotinus, 'The Soul'

19		"The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace." Plato, 'Phaedrus'

20		"The Soul makes each being one by looking upon The One." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

21		"Souls are responsive one to another because they all come from the same soul – The Soul." Plotinus, 'The Soul'

22		"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. If the soul knows this, it will move around this center from which it came, will cling to it and commune with it as indeed all souls should….for divinity consists in being attached to the center." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

23		"The world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God." Plato, 'Timaeus'

24		"To The One the soul must return: it is the law embedded in its ontological structure." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator

25		"No intelligible entity ever passes away. All it contains exists in an eternal present." Plotinus, 'The Three Primal Hypostases'