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

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

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

4		"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'

5		"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'

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

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

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

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

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

11		"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

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

13		"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

14		"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'

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

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

17		"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

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

19		"As the genus contains all the species or as the whole contains all the parts, The Intelligence contains all beings." Plotinus, 'The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being'

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

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

22		"There is at the core of every existing thing an ontic desire for what is lacking to its perfectness, and this perfectness it can find in its fullness solely within that which initially engendered it." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator

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

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

25		"True knowledge of self and true knowledge of God are so intimately linked within the soul that, if the soul is purified of all that is not itself, it knows at one and the same time itself, and in itself, God." Elmer O'Brien, S.J., translator