Porphyry (philosopher)

“Porphyry at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005)”

“One of the most erudite as well as one of the most spiritual, of the literati of any age or people, and certainly the most estimable of all the extant Greek philosophers after the days of Plutarch.”

“In the writings of such "pagan" philosophers as Plutarch and Porphyry we find a humanitarian ethic of the most exalted kind, which, after undergoing a long repression during medieval churchdom, reappeared, albeit but weakly and fitfully at first, in the literature of the Renaissance, to be traced more definitely in the eighteenth century school of "sensibility."”

“So people should abstain from other animals just as they should from the human.”

“The Pythagoreans made kindness to beasts a training in humanity and pity.”

“Animals are rational; in most of them logos is imperfect, but it is certainly not wholly lacking. So if, as our opponents say, justice applies to rational beings, why should not justice, for us, also apply to animals?”

“Not only can logos be seen in absolutely all animals, but in many of them it has the groundwork for being perfected.”

“Every good thing is gentle and consistent, progressing in good order and not going beyond what is right.”

“I think that when friendship and perception of kinship ruled everything, no one killed any creature, because people thought the other animals were related to them.”

“The fleshless diet contributes to health and to a suitable endurance of hard work in philosophy.”

“Incorporeal hypostases, in descending, are distributed into parts, and multiplied about individuals with a diminution of power; but when they ascend by their energies beyond bodies, they become united, and proceed into a simultaneous subsistence, through exuberance of power.”

“Soul, indeed, is a certain medium between an impartible essence, and an essence which is divisible about bodies. But intellect is an impartible essence alone. And qualities and material forms are divisible about bodies. Not everything which acts on another, effects that which it does effect by approximation and contact; but those natures which effect any thing by approximation and contact, use approximation accidentally.”

“Every body is in place; but nothing essentially incorporeal, or any thing of this kind, has any locality.”