Many / One

A database of 11,000+ illuminated guiding quotations in 40 categories from 600+ inspired books by our most brilliant and influential authors.
Compiled by JoAnn Kite

SHOW detailed search and navigation | Quotes | References | JoAnn

1		"Man is a single Monad, uncompounded and indivisible, yet compounded and divisible; loving and at peace with all things yet warring with all things and at war with itself in all things; unlike and like itself, as it were a musical harmony containing all things;…showing forth all things and giving birth to all things." Hippolytus, 'Elenchos' VIII, 12, 5ff. Collected Works (Carl Jung)

2		"There is something in the spirit of man that knows that the dualism, however apparently binding, runs out, exhausts itself, and leaves a core of assurance that the ultimate destiny of man is good." Howard Thurman One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from World Faiths (Matthew Fox)

3		"The self is a unit, consisting however of two, i.e., of opposites, otherwise it would not be a totality." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

4		“Contemplate all things, even the things that are opposites, in a simple unity within the universal Cause.” Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (John Farina, Editor-in-Chief)

5		"The opposites are necessarily of a characterilogical nature: the existence of a positive virtue implies victory over its opposite, the corresponding vice. Without its counterpart virtue would be pale, ineffective, and unreal." Mysterium Coniunctionis Collected Works (Carl Jung)

6		"Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen, but experienced, unity and identity in us all." A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Diane K. Osbon, editor)

7		"Experience has amply confirmed that, in the psyche as in nature, a tension of opposites creates a potential which may express itself at any time in a manifestation of energy. Between above and below flows the waterfall, and between hot and cold there is a turbulent exchange of molecules. Similarly, between the psychic opposites there is generated a uniting symbol." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

8		"Good and evil are the light and shade of the same thing." Duncton Found (William Horwood)

9		"What we call opposites are only complementary parts of a greater whole." The Findhorn Garden: Pioneering a New Vision of Man and Nature in Cooperation (The Findhorn Community)

10		"The primal Self contains all the archetypal potential and all the dynamic oppositions necessary to achieve the goal of individuation." Ariadne's Clue, A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind (Anthony Stevens)

11		"There is no balance, no system of self-regulation, without opposition. The psyche is just such a self-regulating system." 'On the Psychology of the Unconscious' Collected Works (Carl Jung)

12		"The self is made manifest in the opposites and in the conflict between them; it is a 'coincidentia oppositorum'." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

13		"Everything in nature is a blend of these two forces [yang and yin]. What is demanded is a holistic point of view so that an over-identification with either one of the terms is avoided. The light implies the dark, the male, the female – there is no absolute separation, for both create the whole…Within the whole which they comprise, the alternation of these two forces create the processes of nature and the entire universe, visible and invisible." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

14		"The psyche's movement to harmony and wholeness is a balancing of opposites." Spiritual Pilgrims, Carl Jung & Teresa of Avila (John Welch, O. Carm.)

15		"Both yin and yang have their common origin in an undivided One." The Secret of the Golden Flower (Richard Wilhelm, translator)

16		"'Harmony' (from the Greek 'harmonia', signifying 'fitting together') in music, as elsewhere in the cosmos, comes from the reconciliation of opposites by a third element, bringing them all a new unity." A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

17		"Consistent themes in these [mythic] stories emerge quickly: opposites are balanced by a third, mediating element that reconciles a conflict, healing the split of polarity and transforming separate parts into a complete and successful whole." A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

18		"In a world that is split, divided by the 'Civil War of Man', healing is needed to make whole. Mandala is a whole-ing technique; it is the alchemy of opposites reuniting, a blueprint that can be placed upon anything, or any man or being." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

19		"Polar tension occurs in all natural and human affairs as any opposing relationship, contrast, difference. It is at the root of our pernicious notion of separateness from each other, from nature, and from our own inherent divinity. The paradox of the Dyad (polarity) is that while it appears to separate from unity, its opposite poles remember their source and attract each other in an attempt to merge and return to that state of unity." A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

20		“The pairs of opposites constitute the phenomenology of the paradoxical Self, man’s totality.” Collected Works (Carl Jung)

21		“If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.” Collected Works (Carl Jung)

22		"Chaos is infinitely complex order." David Bohm, physicist The Mystic Hours, A Daybook of Interspiritual Wisdom & Devotion (Wayne Teasdale)

23		"In accordance with the principle of compensation which runs through the whole of nature, every psychic development, whether individual or collective, possesses an optimum which, when exceeded, produces an enantiodromia, that is, turns into its opposite." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

24		"The authentic selfhood of the human being is…alchemically integrated from the opposites of light and dark, good and evil, masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious. It is not by simple extension or a lineal path of growth, but by the oppositional conflict and eventual reconciliation of the opposites that the fullness of being is restored within the individual soul." The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Stephan A. Hoeller)

25		"The distinction between eternity and time is only apparent – made, perforce, by the rational mind, but dissolved in the perfect knowledge of the mind that has transcended the pairs of opposites." Hero With A Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)