Kenosis to Gnosis

"How is this to be accomplished? Let all else go!"  

 

"Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us."  

 

"Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also."

"We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order."

 

"In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view; the vision is such that seeing and seen are one; object and act of vision have become identical."

 

"Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing."  

 

"Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts."  

 

"Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly."  

"Knowledge has three degrees: opinion, science, illumination. The means our instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition."  

 

"Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being."  

 

"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."  

 

"Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine."

 

"Never stop working on your statue until the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, until you see self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat."  

 

On refusing to have his portrait painted, "It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me. Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?"  

"God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that he is so."  

 

"We are not separated from spirit, we are in it."

 

"Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful."