Neoplatonism Quotes

“The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.”
― Marsilio Ficino

“We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing, a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.”
― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus

“The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Second Series

“The history of all love is writ with one pen.”
― William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

“Fusing the doctrines of Plotinus and Proclus with the creeds and beliefs of Christianity, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite combined the Neo-Platonic conviction of the fundamental oneness and luminous aliveness of the world with the Christian dogmas of the triune God, original sin and redemption. The universe is created, animated and unified by the perpetual self-realization of what Plotinus had called" the One, "what the Bible had called" the Lord, "and what he calls" the superessential Light.”
― erwin panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts

“All their religious conceptions are outward and material. They say that God is of a bodily nature, and has a body in form like that of a man. Material, too, is their conception of eternal life. Ask to what place they are departing, or what hope they have, and they answer — “To another land better than this.” Divine men of old told of a happy life for happy souls, to be passed in the “isles of the blest,” or in the Elysian plains of which Homer speaks. Plato taught that the soul was immortal, and expressly calls the place where it is sent “earth."…They expect to see God with the bodily eye, to hear His voice with their ears, and to touch Him with sensible hands…If a race so craven and carnal can understand anything, let them give ear. Give up your outward vision and look upwards with your mind; turn aside from the eye of the flesh and raise the eye of the soul: only so will you see God. And if you seek a guide, you must shun vagabonds and jugglers who recommend their phantoms; you must not blaspheme as idols those who prove themselves to be gods, while you worship one who is not even an idol, but truly a dead man, and seek out a father like unto Him.”
― Celsus, The Fragments of Celsus

“In his numerous historical and Scriptural worksBauerrejects all supernatural religion, and represents Christianity as a natural product of the mingling of the Stoic and Alexandrian philosophies...”
― Joseph McCabe, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists

“The wisest of nations, cities, and men in every age have held by certain general principles of thought and action: to this ancient tradition the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians and Indians, Samothracians and Druids, alike adhere; but the Jews and Moses have no part nor lot in it. I pass by those who explain away the Mosaic records by plausible allegorising. The Mosaic account in regard to the age of the world is false: the flood being in the time of Deucalion was comparatively recent. Neither the teaching nor the institutions of Moses have any claim to originality. He appropriated doctrines which he had heard from men and nations of repute for wisdom. He borrowed the rite of circumcision from the Egyptians. He deluded goatherds and shepherds into the belief that there was one God — whom they called the Highest, or Adonai, or the Heavenly, or Sabaoth, or whatever names they please to give to this world — and there their knowledge ceased. It is of no import whether the God over all be called by the name that is usual among the Greeks, or that which obtains among the Indians or Egyptians.”
― Celsus, The Fragments of Celsus

“The Jews, like other separate nationalities, have established laws according to their national genius, and preserve a form of worship which has at least the merit of being ancestral and national, — for each nation has its own institutions, whatever they may chance to be. This seems an expedient arrangement, not only because different minds think differently, and because it is our duty to preserve what has been established in the interests of the state, but also because in all probability the parts of the earth were originally allotted to different overseers, and are now administered accordingly. 2 To do what is pleasing to these overseers is to do what is right: to abolish the institutions that have existed in each place from the first is impiety.”
― Celsus, The Fragments of Celsus

“They have been instructed by nature and the sacred laws to serve the living God, who is superior to the good, and more simple than the one, and more ancient than the unit; with whom, however, who is there of those who profess piety that we can possibly compare?”
― Philo of Alexandria, The Works of Philo