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		"Every movement that returns to its point of origin must adopt the form of a circle. Only circular movement is continuous and consistent. Every object of nature is, then, a circle, whose function and activity derive from its center point, which is the soul." Dr. Felix Marti-Ibanez, 'Centaur, Essays on the History of Medical Ideas' Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery (Cranston/Head, editors)

2		"This sense of rounded completeness is always in man's mind as a background hope to all his thoughts and activities. He imagines his own lifetime to have a rounded completeness." Creative Vision for Art and for Life (Richard Guggenheimer)

3		"Mandalas have been used by many cultures to represent the creation of the universe. Carl Jung has theorized that mandalas represent centering, the unification of parts of the psyche." Seeing With the Mind's Eye (Mike Samuels, M.D. and Nancy Samuels)

4		"Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles, and everything tries to be round." Black Elk (1863-1950), Native American elder A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

5		"Mandalas…are produced spontaneously, without external influence, even by children and adults who have never come into contact with any such ideas….The mandala symbolizes, by its central point, the ultimate unity of all archetypes as well as the multiplicity of the phemonenal world, and is therefore the empirical equivalent of the metaphysical concept of a 'unus mundus' [one world]." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

6		"The Universe is boundless and unlimited, a circle whose circumference is everywhere." Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge (Zolar)

7		“The circle has had enduring psychological significance from the earliest expressions of human consciousness to the most sophisticated forms of 20th-century art.” Aniela Jaffe, ‘Symbolism in the Visual Arts’ Man and His Symbols (Carl Jung)

8		"I think the Native Americans have it right when they say, 'Life is a circle'." Joan Borysenko, Ph.D. Angels: The Mysterious Messengers (Rex Hauck, editor)

9		"The whole world is a circle. All of these circular images reflect the psyche, so there may be some relationship between these architectural designs and the actual structuring of our spiritual functions….the circle represents totality. Everything within the circle is one thing, which is encircled, enframed. That would be the spatial aspect. But the temporal aspect of the circle is that you leave, go somewhere, and always come back. God is the alpha and the omega, the source and the end. The circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in space." The Power of Myth (Joseph Campbell)

10		"In Jung's view, mandalas and all concomitant images….are derived from dreams and visions corresponding to the most basic of religious symbols known to mankind – symbols which are known to have existed as far back as the Paleolithic Age, as is proved, for example, by the Rhodesian rock engravings." A Dictionary of Symbols (J. E. Cirlot)

11		"In Black Elk's vision, the hoop of his people will be reunited only when the tree of the center flowers once again. This is the vision of a Mandala of global consciousness." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

12		"Every point is equally the center of a circle whose radius is infinite." The Inner Life (Charles W. Leadbeater)

13		"In spiritual traditions worldwide, mandalas focus and reflect the spiritual content of the psyche for both maker and viewer. They are used as a healing and transforming art in Native American sand painting, Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist rituals, and modern psycho-therapy. In Jungian psychology, the mandala brings about healing in a type of psychological event called a crisis of transition. Here the ego fragments and is in danger of collapsing; the mandala forges a new relationship of the ego to the Self." Mandala, Luminous Symbols for Healing (Judith Cornell, Ph.D.)

14		"Man is an imperishable circle in the sphere of Divinity." Reincarnation: Fact or Fallacy? (Geoffrey Hodson)

15		"The mandala as a symbol of the self is the psyche's expression of its fundamental orientation to wholeness. Not only is it an expression of the goal, but it also indicates that the psyche has a built-in dynamism moving it toward its objective." Spiritual Pilgrims, Carl Jung & Teresa of Avila (John Welch, O. Carm.)

16		"Self-knowledge reveals to the soul that its natural motion is not, if uninterrupted, in a straight line, but circular, as around some inner object, about a center, the point to which it owes its origin. If the soul knows this, it will move around this center from which it came, will cling to it and commune with it as indeed all souls should….for divinity consists in being attached to the center." Plotinus, 'The Good or The One' The Essential Plotinus (Translated by Elmer O'Brien, S.J.)

17		"Among the Chinese, the infinite being is frequently symbolized as a point of light with concentric circles spreading outwards from it." A Dictionary of Symbols (J. E. Cirlot)

18		"The Mandala was developed as a reminder of the direct perception of reality." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

19		"Mandalas are also formed with the hands, danced, and represented in music (for instance Bach's 'Art of Fugue')….When a mandala is being formed, everything round and square known to man works on it too. But the impetus for its formation comes from the unconscious archetype." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

20		"Symbolically, in the infinite ocean of light, with centre everywhere and with circumference nowhere, there arises a full-orbed sphere of living light, a Logos, and the surface of the sphere is His will to limit Himself that He may become manifest, His veil in which He incloses Himself that within it a universe may take form." The Ancient Wisdom (Annie Besant)

21		"The universe is a mandalic mirror – a sacred art and science of divine creative processes." Mandala, Luminous Symbols for Healing (Judith Cornell, Ph.D.)

22		"Between four and six thousand years ago the ancient peoples in Europe built stone circles and decorated them with interlocking scroll loops. Similar motifs appear all over the world. The psychologist Carl Jung said such images are archetypes or universal structures in the collective unconscious of humankind. Could such a collective wisdom perhaps be expressing its intuitions of the wholeness within nature, the order and simplicity, chance and predictability that lie in the interlocking and unfolding of things?" Turbulent Mirror (John Briggs and F. David Peat)

23		"Represent Unity by a circle; at the Present Moment, outside Time, a scission occurs and forms two streams: one goes to the left, away from the other, which goes to the right; each runs on a half of the circle, the Chinese Yin and Yang. On the opposite side, the antagonists rediscover each other and unite. The circle, or cycle, has never ceased to be, the scission has broken nothing…..This absurdity is the Truth." R. A. Schwaller deLubicz, 'Nature Word', Lindisfarne Nature Word (R. A. Schwaller deLubicz)

24		"The circle has been variously interpreted as a state of oneness, unity, heaven, the sun, Yang, the Self, ultimate wholeness, enlightenment." Seeing With the Mind's Eye (Mike Samuels, M.D. and Nancy Samuels)

25		"Universally inherent in man's consciousness, the Mandala has continually appeared in his constructions, rituals and art forms." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)