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		"Archetypes are forms of different aspects expressing the creative psychic background. They are and always have been numinous and therefore 'divine.' In a very generalizing way we can therefore define them as attributes of the creator. That would explain the compelling character of such inner perceptions." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

2		"Archetypal images are not remnants of archaic thought, not a dead deposit, but part of a living system of interactions between the human psyche and the outer world." Mirrors of The Self, Archetypal Images That Shape Your Life (Christine Downing, editor)

3		"Nature itself rests on an internal foundation of archetypal principles symbolized by numbers, shapes, and their arithmetic and geometric relationships." A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

4		"Archetypes are organs of Essence, the cosmic blueprints of how it all works." A Mythic Life, Learning to Live our Greater Story (Jean Houston)

5		"There is no excellence among the creatures which is not to be found in a much higher style, and as an archetype, in the Creator." Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) A Treasury of Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Dagobert D. Runes, editor)

6		"Quintessentially, archetypes are about relationship….As inhabitants of the We Are realm, archetypes bridge spirit with nature, mind with body, and self with universe. They are always within us, essential elements within the structure of our psyches." A Mythic Life, Learning to Live our Greater Story (Jean Houston)

7		"The point of archetypal images, like the point of myths, is not problem solving but imagining, questioning, going deeper. Archetypal images free us from identifying ourselves with our literal failures and successes or from seeing our lives as banal, or trivial. The aim in attending to these images is to awaken us to a sense of our yet unrealized latent possibilities, to save us from our sense of isolation and meaninglessness. It is to open up our lives to renewal and reshaping. Attending to the images creates a new bond between our personal lives and the collective experience of humankind." Mirrors of The Self, Archetypal Images That Shape Your Life (Christine Downing, editor)

8		"When we speak of archetypal images we are not referring simply to dream images or to mythological or literary images. We are, instead, speaking of a way to respond to our ordinary lives with our imaginations, rather than only pragmatically or logically. We are speaking of a way of being in the world that is open to many dimensions of meaning, open to resonances, echoes, to associative and synchronous connections, not only causal ones. We are speaking of a world discovered to be full of sign-ificance – of signs, symbols, metaphors, images." Mirrors of The Self, Archetypal Images That Shape Your Life (Christine Downing, editor)

9		"Archetypal images are found in virtually all cultures and during all ages, thus representing a kind of universal language." The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience (Ralph Metzner)

10		"Symbols, images, and archetypes are indeed, and function as, a bridge or connection between the known and the unknown, the conscious and the Deep Mind, actuality and potentiality. They are elements in a progressive developmental path or curriculum by which the many can become one, by which the profane can be linked with the sacred, and by which the supreme synthesis of finding Union with God can be realized – the true purpose and destiny of all human beings on earth." Divine Light and Fire, Experiencing Esoteric Christianity (Peter Roche deCoppens)

11		"The ancient magical and mythological levels of our being, although 'unconscious' to our current modus operandi, need to be recognised as vital capacities of ours. If we fail to integrate them with our rational world view, we are likely to regress into a new barbarism rather than take the next step of conscious evolution." Return of the Goddess (Edward C. Whitmont, MD)

12		"The soul, which is immortal, has an arithmetical, as the body has a geometrical, beginning. This beginning, as the reflection of the great universal Archaeus, is self-moving, and from the centre diffuses itself over the whole body of the microcosm." Isis Unveiled (Helena P. Blavatsky)

13		"As animals of the same kind show the same instinctual phenomena all over the world, man also shows the same archetypal forms no matter where he lives. As animals have no need to be taught their instinctive activities, so man also possesses his primordial psychic patterns and repeats them spontaneously, independently of any kind of teaching." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

14		"Ultimately every archetype is merely an individual expression of one Universal energy pattern, which is our connection to the Divine." C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D., Foreword Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential (Caroline Myss)

15		"For all the beautiful things in the world would never have been what they are if they hadn't been molded after the archetype of true beauty, the Uncreated, the Blessed, the Imperishable." Philo (c. 15bc-45ad), Alexandrian Jewish philosopher God, A Companion for Seekers (David Schiller)

16		"Since the archetypes, or elementary ideas, are not limited in their distributions by cultural or even linguistic boundaries, they cannot be defined as culturally determined." The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Joseph Campbell)

17		"Physically the structure of a cell retains its identity, even while the matter that composes it is continually altered. The cell rebuilds itself in line with its own pattern of identity, yet is always a part of emerging action, alive and responding even in the midst of its own multitudinous deaths. So psychological structures form to which various names are given. The names are meaningless, but the structures behind them are not. Such psychological structures also retain their identity, their pattern of uniqueness, even while they change constantly, die and are reborn." The Nature of Personal Reality (Jane Roberts)

18		"By far the greatest number of spontaneous synchronistic phenomena that I have had occasion to observe and analyse can easily be shown to have a direct connection with an archetype." Synchronicity, An Acausal Principle (Carl Jung)

19		"They (the Archetypes) are, indeed, an instinctive trend, as marked as the impulse of birds to build nests, or ants to form organized colonies." Carl Jung Man and His Symbols (Carl Jung)

20		"Archetypes use the analogical-allegorical method rather than the descriptive-analytical one. This means that they are multidimensional, having not one set of meanings, preestablished and socially standardized, but many sets of meanings and correspondences….they are not static and closed but rather dynamic and open, with ever-new emergent levels that come to the foreground as new layers and states of consciousness are activated; they are based on the principle of correspondence and homology, derived from the classical assumption that all things in the universe are interrelated and that the microcosm (human nature) is a reflection of the macrocosm (the world." Divine Light and Fire, Experiencing Esoteric Christianity (Peter Roche deCoppens)

21		"The feminine aspect of the God-image, as an archetype, is in fact form without limitation, eternal and yet manifest and repeatable in an infinite number of individuals." Aurora Consurgens (Marie Louise vonFranz)

22		"In the mythopoetic fantasy, the soul experiences its own subjective reality. Myth is unashamed subjectivity. It depicts how the soul perceives existence. 'Once upon a time' implies forever and 'here' implies everywhere. This gives the fairy tale its moving impact. It evokes timeless truth." Return of the Goddess (Edward C. Whitmont, MD)

23		"Ideas are the original forms (formae principales), the stable and immutable ground of things….They are a part of divine intelligence." Modern Esoteric Spirituality (Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, editors)

24		"The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light." A Greater Psychology, An Introduction to Sri Aurobindo's Psychological Thought (Sri Aurobindo, edited by A. S. Dalal)

25		"The soul must contain in itself the faculty of relationship to God, that is, a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about. This correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of the God-image." 'Psychology and Alchemy' Collected Works (Carl Jung)