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		"The unconscious is that immortal sea which brought us hither; intimations of which are given in moments of 'oceanic feeling'; one sea of energy or instinct, embracing all mankind, without distinction of race, language, or culture; and embracing all the generations, past, present, and future, in one mystical body." Norman O. Brown, 'Love's Body', Vintage 1966

2		"Because these (archetypal) symbols are collective or transpersonal, to touch the archetype is actually to begin to transcend oneself, to find deeply within an intimation and pointer to the deeply beyond."

3		"The world as unity of opposites, from the formed towards the forming, is essentially a world from present to present; the moment of the eternal present which is the unity of opposites." Kitaro Nishida, 'Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness', East-West Press 1958

4		"There is thus an incessant multiplication of the inexhaustible One and unification of the indefinitely Many. Such are the beginnings and endings of worlds and of individual beings: expanded from a point without position or dimensions and a now without date or duration." Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

5		"Nicholas de Cusa called God the 'coincidence of opposites'. Actually, this is today the way the astro-physicists view the universe – it curves back in on itself like a Mobius strip, and thus has no outside, and having no outside neither does it have an inside, or, one can say its inside is its outside: the coincidence of opposites, the universe as non-dual."

6		"Moment without duration, point without extension – these are the Golden Mean, and inconceivably Strait Way leading out of time into eternity, from death to immortality." Ananda Coomaraswamy, 'The Bugbear of Literacy'

7		"The unborn timeless Mind is working in us. The Buddha-mind and our mind are not two." Bankei, quoted in 'Living by Zen' by D. T. Suzuki, Rider, 1972

8		"This very earth is the Lotus Land of Purity; And this body is the body of Buddha." Hakuin

9		"The real is near, you do not have to search for it;… Truth is in what IS – and that is the beauty of it." J. Krishnamurti, 'The First and Last Freedom', Quest 1954

10		"As it is with light and electricity, so it may be with life; the phenomena may be individuals carrying on separate existences in space and time, while in the deeper reality beyond space and time we may all be members of one body." Sir James Jeans, quoted in 'Man and the Universe, the Philosophers of Science', Commins/Linscott, ed.

11		"The universe is likened to a net of glittering gems, wherein each jewel contains the reflections of all other jewels, and its reflection in turn exists in all the other gems: 'one in all, all in one,' or 'unity in diversity, diversity in unity.'"

12		"Each instant our Energy is constantly rising from 'below', from the Level of Mind, where it is pure, informal, non-objective, timeless and spaceless Energy that operates Now in a moment without duration."

13		"Whether we call him Person, or Sacerdotium, or Magna Matter, or by any other grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter names, 'That' of which our powers are measures is a syzygy of conjoint principles, without composition or duality. These conjoint principles…become contraries only when we descend from the silent level of the Non-duality to speak in terms of subject and object and to recognize the many separate and individual existences that the All or Universe presents to our physical organs of perception. And since this finite totality can only be logically and not really divided from its infinite source, 'That One' can also be called an 'Integral Multiplicity' and 'Omniform Light.'" Ananda Coomaraswamy, 'Hinduism and Buddhism'

14		"This sensation of being one with the universe is much more common than one might initially suspect, for it is the very foundation of all other sensations."

15		"At each moment Nature starts upon a long, long journey and at each moment reaches her end…All is eternally present in her, for she knows neither past nor future. For her the present is eternity." Goethe, 'Fragments on Nature'

16		"The Seer, the That in you which knows, in actuality is not separate from what it sees – it IS what it sees, for the Knower sees a thing by being that thing, as St. Thomas Aquinas stated, 'Knowledge comes about in so far as the object known is within the knower.' (Summa Theologica I, q. 59, a. 2)"

17		"The Will….is a three-dimensional act of the total organism to globally move in time towards some future end….The Will itself is an act of the person's total being. The Will is a moving prehension. It is an intentionality."

18		"Every thing simultaneously includes all (other things) in perfect completion, without the slightest deficiency or omission, at all times. To see one object is, therefore, to see all objects, and vice versa. This is to say a tiny individual particle within the minute cosmos of an atom actually contains the infinite objects and principles in the infinite universes of the future and of the remote past in the perfect completeness without omission." Chang, 'Buddhist Teaching of Totality'

19		"In reality, there is Mind-only, all inclusive, non-dual, the timeless ground of all temporal phenomena, fusion without confusion, a Reality without duality but not without relations."

20		"Self-nature is synonymous with 'Buddha-nature', which the 'Nirvana Sutra' declares is inherent in all beings, and thus seeing into one's Self-nature is nothing less than the attainment of Buddhahood."

21		"The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings." Huang Po (Bloefield, 'Zen Teachings of Huang Po')

22		"Duality and the opposites are, in short, terms of relation or of thought, but not of reality."

23		"The very root 'layer' of the unconscious is the universe itself. The sun, moon, and stars, the mountains, clouds, and waters, even the cars, planes, and trains: these truly are some of the 'contents' of our base unconscious."

24		"We may state as a characteristic of modern science that the scheme of isolable units acting in one-way-causality has proved to be insufficient. Hence the appearance, in all fields of science, of notions like wholeness, holistic, organismic, gestalt, etc., which all signify that in the last resort, we must think in terms of systems of elements in mutual interaction." Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 'General Systems Theory', G. Braziller, 1968

25		"Mind itself is intemporal, timeless, eternal."