Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

Plotinus, The Enneads, IV, 8

Life is love of life.

This sinking one’s teeth into the things which the act of eating involves above all measure the surplus of the reality…is the way the I, the absolute commencement, is suspended in the non-I.

The underlying tragic element in the ego [is] the fact that it is riveted to its own being.

Even if the content of life ensures my life, the means is immediately sought as an end, and the pursuit of this end becomes an end in its turn.

What it [the human being] lacks is its source of plenitude and wealth. Need, a happy dependence, is capable of satisfaction, like a void, which gets filled.

Borrowed quote salad, all from Levinas, all via Social Theory & Private Affairs