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		"Under the spur of love life draws near to Life."

2		"Trust your deep instincts: use your latent powers. Appropriate that divine creative life which is the very substance of your being. Remake yourself in its interest, if you would know its beauty and its truth. You can only behold that which you are. Only the Real can know Reality."

3		"The object of the mystic's contemplation is always some aspect of the Infinite Life: of God, the one Reality."

4		"The spring of the amazing energy which enables the great mystic to rise to freedom and dominate his world, is latent in all of us; an integral part of our humanity."

5		"Beauty is simply Reality seen with the eyes of love."

6		"'That Which Is', says St. Augustine; 'The One', 'The Supplier of true Life', says Plotinus; 'the energitic Word', says St. Bernard; 'Eternal Light', says Dante; 'the Abyss', says Ruysbroeck; 'Pure Love', says St. Catherine of Genoa – poor symbols of Perfection at the best. But, through and by these oblique utterances, they give us the assurance that the Object of their discovery is one with the object of our quest."

7		"Whoever in Love's city enters, finds but room for One, and but in One-ness, Union." Jalalu'd Din, 'Wisdom of the East Series'

8		"No transmutation without fire, say the alchemists: No cross, no crown, says the Christian. All the great experts of the spiritual life agree – whatever their creeds, their symbols, their explanations – in describing this stress, tribulation, and loneliness, as an essential part of the way from the Many to the One; bringing the self to the threshold of that completed life which is to be lived in intimate union with Reality."

9		"Natural magnetism…will draw the pilgrim irresistibly along the road from the Many to the One."

10		"The Power of God exceeds and fills all." St. Angela of Foligno

11		"This universe is free, self-creative. The divine action floods it: no part is more removed from the Godhead than any other part."

12		"Do but fix your eyes joyously upon yourself, and watch how God plays the game of love within your loving soul." Suso, 'Leban', cap. vi

13		"The manifestation of the Eternal Light is renewed without interruption in the hiddenness of the spirit."

14		"All…are called to their origin." Rulman Merswin

15		"This One is…not merely the Reality of all that is, but also a living and personal Object of Love."

16		"The mystic vision is of a spiritual universe held within the bonds of love."

17		"The spirit of God breathes us out from Himself that we may love."

18		"I have ascended higher than myself, and lo! I have found the Word above me still. My curiosity has led me to descend below myself also, and yet I have found Him still at a lower depth. If I have looked without myself, I have found that He is beyond that which is outside of me; and if within, He was at an inner depth still. And thus have I learned the truth of the words I have read, 'In Him we live and move and have our being.'" St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 'Cantica Canticorum, Sermon lxxiv

19		"I but open my eyes, - and perfection, no more and no less, in the kind I imagined full-fronts me, and God is seen God in the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod." Robert Browning, 'Saul'

20		"Divine Love, immanent in the soul, spurs on that soul to union with the transcendent and Absolute Light – at once the source, the goal, the life of created things."

21		"The world-process is the slow coming to fruition of that Divine Spark which is latent alike in the Cosmos and in man."

22		"To say that God is Infinite is to say that He may be apprehended and described in an infinity of ways. That Circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, may be approached from every angle with a certainty of being found."

23		"The simple vision of pure love, which is marvellously penetrating, does not stop at the outer husk of creation: it penetrates to the divinity which is hidden within." Malaval, 'De l'Oraison Ordinaire'

24		"Love flings open a door, in order that the larger Life may rush in, and it and the soul be one thing."

25		"Everywhere one Being, one Life – this is the goal of activity; the final state of equilibrium towards which the self is moving, or rather struggling, in the dimness and anguish of the Dark Night….The Dark Night is therefore an aspect or incident of the transition from multiplicity to Unity; of that mergence and union of the soul with the Absolute which is the whole object of the mystical evolution of man."