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

There are those who are unarmed. But who has weapons, fights. There is no God who fights for those who are not in arms. The law requires that victory in war is to the brave, not to those who pray. It is just that the cowardly are dominated by the wicked.

Knowledge has three degrees — opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, logic; of the third, insight.

For the Soul is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath to the totality of
life: and each of us is an Intellectual Kosmos, linked to this world by what is lowest
in us, but, by what is the highest, to the Divine Intellect: by all that is intellective we
are permanently in that higher realm, but at the fringe of the Intellectual we are fet-
tered to the lower; it is as if we gave forth from it some emanation towards that
lower, or, rather some Act, which however leaves our diviner part not in itself
diminished.