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		"We live and are in God, we are of His substance, we have heaven and hell in ourselves; what we make of ourselves, that we are." Jacob Boehme, 'The Threefold Life of Man'

2		"Throughout the whole course of this struggle [of life] we observe on the side of spirit – or, if you like it better, on the psychic side of life – an unmistakable instinct for transcendence: 'an internal push, which has carried life by more and more complex forms to higher and higher destinies.' (Bergson, 'L'Evolution creatrice')."

3		"We are like coals, burned on the hearth of Infinite Love." Ruysbroeck, 'De Septem gradibus amoris', ch. 14

4		"Life immanent and life transcendent, the Temporal and the Eternal order, are the complementary expressions of a Reality which is one."

5		"Deity, in so far as it is apprehended by human intuition and love, appears to us as a vast, all-encompassing, all-penetrating Reality, which is both transcendent and immanent, static and dynamic, changeless yet changeful, ineffable yet personal."

6		"You need not call Him from a distance, your opening and His entering are but one moment."

7		"This Life – the divine elan vital – is an energetic spirit, thrusting itself to expression in and through the world."

8		"I am God, says Love; for Love is God and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of Love." Ruysbroeck, 'The Mirror of Simple Souls'

9		"Knowledge of ourselves, which we too easily confuse with knowledge of our sins, means accurate consciousness of our powers as well as of our deficiencies. It means the bringing of all the levels of our nature into the field of consciousness: a complete review of the available material."

10		"We feel, interpenetrating and supporting us, the action of a surging, creative Spirit, which transcends all its material manifestations."

11		"The glory of that One Reality [is] ablaze in the humblest of growing things."

12		"Divine Love is not a single thread that links creature and Creator; but rather a web that knits up the many with the One."

13		"The movement which He (Christ) initiated…is in essence a genuinely biological rather than a merely creedal or intellectual development of the race. In it, we see life exercising her sovereign power of spontaneous creation: breaking out on new paths."

14		"Man, said St. Bernard [of Clairvaux] is 'a capacity for the Infinite.'"

15		"As gradually and naturally as the embryo of physical life emerges into the physical world, the germ of real life which is latent in human personality takes form and develops to the mystic climax of perfect participation in the Eternal World."

16		"There are no breaks in the World of Becoming; Life, though it be instinct with spontaneity, though it cut new paths for its branching stream in fresh, unimaginable directions, behave in a thousand incalculable ways, ever remains one."

17		"When Angela of Foligno says, 'I had comprehension of the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the Abyss and all things else; and therein I beheld naught save the divine power in a manner which is verily indescribable, so that through greatness of marvelling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying 'This whole world is full of God' – when we read this, an intuition deep within us replies that it can here recognise the accent of truth."

18		"All is fused into one great work of art, all forms part of one living whole."

19		"The holy spark of the divine nature within (humanity) has a natural, strong, and almost infinite tendency or reaching after that eternal Light and Spirit of God from whence it came forth. It came forth from God, it came out of God, it partakes of the divine nature, and therefore it is always in a state of tendency and return to God." William Law, 'The Spirit of Prayer'

20		"Thou art the sky and Thou art the nest as well…..Hidden in the heart of things Thou art nourishing seeds into sprouts, buds into blossoms, and ripening flowers into fruitfulness." Rabindranath Tagore, 'Gitanjali'

21		"Be thou drunken in love, for love is all that exists." Jalalu'ddin, 'Divan'

22		"Only by love can man enter into direct communion with Reality; only by its dynamic power will he raise up the temple in which that Reality can make its home."

23		"Man's will and work are themselves a part of the divine energy."

24		"The action of 'grace', the spirit of love leading life to its highest expression, is continuous from the first travail of creation even until now."

25		"They who see but One in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs eternal truth: unto none else, unto none else." Katha Upanishad