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

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1		"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)

2		"The all-containing Divine Essence…comprises all dichotomies. The Absolute becomes differentiated in polarized manifestations, and through these the vital tensions of the world-process are brought into existence and maintained." Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (Heinrich Zimmer, edited by Joseph Campbell)

3		"Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things." Heraclitus (540-480 bce), from 'Diogenes Laertius, 'Lives of Eminent Philosophers' Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (John Bartlett)

4		"You may call this [life] energy positive and negative, even label it good and evil, but when the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is digested, you will see that all things are one, having emerged from the wars of opposites to unity." The Findhorn Garden: Pioneering a New Vision of Man and Nature in Cooperation (The Findhorn Community)

5		"God appeared to me as the highest unity of all contrasts." Letter of Nicholas of Cusa to Cardinal Julianus Mystics after Modernism (Rudolf Steiner)

6		"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)

7		"It must be known that, though this ignorant, limited, self-defending, suffering body may regard itself as threatened by some other – the enemy – that one too is the God." Hero With A Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)

8		"There is one eternal Law in nature, one that always tends to adjust contraries and to produce final harmony." The Secret Doctrine (Helena P. Blavatsky)

9		"Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of the One as containing all things 'in Its all-embracing Unity…combining even opposites under the form of oneness.'" The Manifold and The One (Agnes Arber)

10		"Love is all opposites – the only reality." The Great Ideas, A Syntopicon, vol. 1 (Mortimer J. Adler, editor)

11		"If we carefully scrutinize our own character we shall inevitably find that, as Lao-Tzu says, 'high stands on low', which means that the opposites condition one another, that they are really one and the same thing." C. G. Jung, Psychological Commentary The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (W. Y. Evans-Wentz, compiler and editor)

12		"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)

13		"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)

14		“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)

15		"Everything in the observable universe responds to an essential union of two opposites, a male and a female principle. From the miracle of electricity to the duality of night and day, everything is harmoniously based on a negative-positive principle." Kabbalah for the Modern World (Migene Gonzalez-Wippler)

16		"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)

17		"Duality is only a stage on the evolutionary arc, leading eventually to the realisation of unity." A Treatise on White Magic (Alice A. Bailey)

18		"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order, in all caprice a fixed law, for everything that works is grounded on its opposite." 'Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious', CW 9, 1 Basic Writings of C G Jung (V S DeLasslo, editor)

19		"The rational mind stresses opposites. Compassion and love go beyond pairs of opposites." A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Diane K. Osbon, editor)

20		"Every moment of this strange and lovely life from dawn to dusk, is a miracle. Somewhere, always, a rose is opening its petals to the dawn. Somewhere, always, a flower is fading in the dusk. The incense that rises with the sun, and the scents that die in the dark, are all gathered, sooner or later, into the solitary fragrance that is God. Faintly, elusively, that fragrance lingers over all of us." Beverly Nichols, 'The Fool Hath Said' Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations (Frank S Mead, editor)

21		"Every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the 'third'. In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

22		"As the holy man and visionary Black Elk stood on the summit of Harney Peak, he had a mystical perception of the universe, a cosmos of harmony and balance transcending all polarities: 'Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world and while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw, for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes, as they must live together like one being.'" Shamanic Voices, A Survey of Visionary Narratives (Joan Halifax, Ph.D.)

23		"In the state of consciousness natural to the field within the mandala – that of Self-realization, or nonduality – such opposites as inner and outer, or subjective and objective, male or female, matter and spirit, are all grasped as connected, married, ultimately unified." Michael Flanagin, Ph.D., 'The Mandala in Jungian Psychotherapy' Mandala, Luminous Symbols for Healing (Judith Cornell, Ph.D.)

24		"The powers of the right and the left unite in the harmony of wisdom." The Acts of John, The Apocryphal New Testament Collected Works (Carl Jung)

25		"Non-dual knowledge is the abolition of all particular view points which restrict and distort reality." T. R. V. Murti, 'Central Philosophy of Buddhism' Spectrum of Consciousness (Ken Wilber)