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		"God is the very spirit and nature of the universe, the image in which it is created, and knowable thus by sense, by reason, and by love, in gradual approximation. God is in all and in every part, and in him all opposites, including good and evil, coincide." The Masks of God (Joseph Campbell)

2		"The Book of Manu declares: 'Whoso holds himself free from the opposites, that one is redeemed.'" The Garden of the Golden Flower, The Journey to Spiritual Fulfilment (Longfield Beatty)

3		"Once you move beyond dualities and realize that life and death, up and down, in and out are all illusions, they join and become one." Miraculous Living (Rabbi Shoni Labowitz)

4		"God is found not only in the light and glory of creation but also in absolute darkness." Wrestling with the Prophets, Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life (Matthew Fox)

5		“The pairs of opposites constitute the phenomenology of the paradoxical Self, man’s totality.” Collected Works (Carl Jung)

6		"The truth is not black or white; it is both. The pairs of opposites of the lower levels merge on the highest level." Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On The Mechanics of Consciousness (Itzhak Bentov)

7		“If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.” Collected Works (Carl Jung)

8		"The self is made manifest in the opposites and in the conflict between them; it is a 'coincidentia oppositorum'." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

9		"Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable." The Gospel of Philip, (3rd century Christian Gnostic sacramental catechism) The Other Bible (Willis Barnstone, editor)

10		"Polarities are but the two extremes perceptible to us of one and the same motion." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

11		"If history reveals anything it is that dissolution and growth have been aspects of the same phenomenon. Growth has not occurred anywhere without involving dissolution. Every major cultural change throughout history has involved this two-fold process of death and emergence." Bernard Eugene Meland (b. 1899), American philosopher and professor of religion, from an article in 'The Personalist' The Choice Is Always Ours (Dorothy B. Phillips, Chief Editor)

12		"Augustine in his mode, and Hegel later in his different mode, adopted and enunciated the fact that any spiritual force will first bring into being its true opposite, and then, balance having been achieved, will conjoin with that opposite to bring into being a product of the two. This causes a new imbalance, so that new pairs of opposites, new unions and new resultants follow." The Sword and The Serpent (Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips)

13		"Our mind divides the world into heaven and earth, day and night, light and darkness, right and left, man and woman, I and you – and the more strongly we sense the separation between these poles, whatever they may be, the more powerfully do we also sense their unity." Karl Menninger (1892-1990), American psychiatrist A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

14		"It is only be recognizing and healing the dualities that exist in ourselves that we can come to a true sense of interdependence with the rest of creation." Dancing in the Flames, The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness (Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson)

15		"When we view reality from the perspective of the Universal Mind, all the usually experienced polarities are transcended. This applies to such categories as spirit-matter, stability-motion, good-evil, male-female, beauty-ugliness, or agony-ecstasy. In the last analysis, there is no absolute difference between subject and object, observer and the observed, experiencer and the experienced, creator and creation. All the roles in the cosmic drama have ultimately only one protagonist, Absolute Consciousness." The Cosmic Game, Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (Stanislav Grof)

16		"No duality can be an originating source; the source of every duality is a monad." Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (John Farina, Editor-in-Chief)

17		"The urge to reconcile all duality and to create synthesis out of polarization is at the core of much of our individual and collective self-development." Soul Centered Astrology, A Key to Your Expanding Self (Alan Oken)

18		"Use the mighty gift of the pairs of opposites to find oneness, to rise, and turn to what you are." To Hear the Angels Sing (Dorothy Maclean)

19		"Everything contains its opposite, as Heraclitus said long ago. 'Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre'. The poet Blake put it in more modern form, 'Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessay to human existence.'" The Springs of Creative Living, A Study of Human Nature and God (Rollo May)

20		"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." Spectrum of Consciousness (Ken Wilber)

21		"Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of the One as containing all things 'in Its all-embracing Unity…combining even opposites under the form of oneness.'" The Manifold and The One (Agnes Arber)

22		“Contemplate all things, even the things that are opposites, in a simple unity within the universal Cause.” Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (John Farina, Editor-in-Chief)

23		"What we need is a way out of dualistic attitudes. We need a third possibility, and that third is soul." Care of the Soul (Thomas Moore)

24		"Most opposites, when stretched far enough apart, paradoxically come full circle only to be rejoined at some point of confluence, some moment or area of tenseless harmony." Breaking the Mind Barrier (Todd Siler)

25		"The darkness within the psyche must be accepted, understood, and ultimately reconciled with the light, in a state of wholeness that is neither light nor darkness but a condition that is both, and yet more than either." The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Stephan A. Hoeller)