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

SHOW detailed search and navigation | Quotes | References | JoAnn

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

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

3		"Awareness of The One comes to us…by a presence transcending knowledge." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

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

5		"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'

6		"The imagination is a power that is, as it were, intellectual. Appetite and impulse are obedient to imagination and to reason." Plotinus, 'The Soul'

7		"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

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

9		"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'

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

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

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

13		"The One, transcendent to all differentiation and form, is the source of all." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator

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

15		"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'

16		"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'

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

18		"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

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

20		"Within this world-in-little, man, the cyclic rhythm perceptible throughout the universe-at-large, the macrocosm, is recurrently portrayed." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator

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

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

23		"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'

24		"It is by The One that all beings are beings." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One'

25		"Nothing hinders anything from sharing in the Good to the extent it is able." Plotinus, 'The Descent of the Soul'