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 "Imagination is the instrument of discovery. The poet and the scientist agree. Discovery is conceiving in imagination, or, more succinctly, discovery IS imagined conception." Imagination (Harold Rugg)

2 "The imagination, that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors." Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), 'The Statesman's Manual' Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (John Bartlett)

3 "Imagine God beyond all beings, yet all beings and being itself." The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (John C. Lilly, M.D.)

4 "Of all the ways in which we try to picture the world, that one alone is real which most completely satisfies our thirst for unity." Science and Christ (Pierre Teilhard deChardin)

5 "I am indeed convinced that creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1906-1950 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

6 "Our imaginations are holy, the Holy Spirit works through us when we create and participate in the ongoing Creation of self, society, universe, and mind." One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from World Faiths (Matthew Fox)

7 "Imagination is a kind of mediator, opening the way to the activity of the intelligible and spiritual life of the human being." Ramon Lull and the Secret of Life (Amador Vega)

8 "Certain basic images are universal. From culture to culture, they may vary somewhat in surface details, or content, but in underlying form they are basically the same. These include the archetypes of figures such as the Hero, the Wise Old Man, the Great Mother, the Self, the Sun-God, the Demon, and events such as Birth, Death, the Initiation Rite, the Sacred Marriage." The Sphinx and The Rainbow: Brain, Mind and Future Vision (David Loye)

9 "Vision or imagination is a Representation of what Eternally Exists, Really and Unchangeably." William Blake (1757-1827), English poet, 'A Vision of the Last Judgment in MS Note-Book p. 95 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (Angela Partington, editor)

10 "We are fish caught in a magic net – imagenetic – because our genes remember, our cells remember, the source, the origin, the beginning – imagenesis – creation out of image – creation of the image – from the image all is born – all is magic – imagnosis – this, through what we imagine, we know." The Spiral Dance, A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (Starhawk (Miriam Simos))

11 "Everything of which we are conscious is an image, and that image IS psyche." C. G. Jung The Secret of the Golden Flower (Richard Wilhelm, translator)

12 "By the use of the creative imagination, the bridge between the lower aspect and higher can be built and constructed. 'As a man thinks, hopes and wills' so is he. This is a statement of an immutable fact." Esoteric Psychology II (Alice A. Bailey)

13 "Imagination is the mother of creativity." Rubem Alves, Brazilian philosopher The Lion Christian Quotation Collection (Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, compilers)

14 "Each soul has an Image in which it can contemplate itself, and so at last resurrect itself." Omens of Millennium (Harold Bloom)

15 "Images bridge the gap between the verbal and non-verbal modes of awareness; they allow the two sides of the brain to communicate, arousing the emotions as well as the intellect." The Spiral Dance, A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (Starhawk (Miriam Simos))

16 "The imagination can, by a process of identification, extend the self out into the world and into other people. The result is….a fusing of the two." J. Engell, 'The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism' The Empathic Imagination (Alfred Margulies, M.D.)

17 "There exists in the human mind a prefiguration of reality, an interior imagery of nature." A God Within (Rene Dubos)

18 "The word disappears, the poetry is gone, but the imaginal form persists within the mind and works on the soul." Shamanic Voices, A Survey of Visionary Narratives (Joan Halifax, Ph.D.)

19 "The image is the seed that contains both the psychic DNA and the motivating forces that shape the fully bloomed flower that you become." A Mythic Life, Learning to Live our Greater Story (Jean Houston)

20 "Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body." Ruland's 'Lexicon Alchemiae' (1612) Alchemy, The Medieval Alchemists and their Royal Art (Johannes Fabricius)

21 "Images have their own potency and their own persistence; they testify to human need and desire, but also to a transcendent frontier." Omens of Millennium (Harold Bloom)

22 "The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope." Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), American journalist and preacher The Lion Christian Quotation Collection (Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, compilers)

23 "Every imagination of humanity comes through the heart, for this is the sun of the microcosm, and out of the microcosm proceeds the imagination into the great world….the imagination of humanity is a seed." Isis Unveiled (Helena P. Blavatsky)

24 "Imagination is a kind of 'organ of the soul' by means of which a person can establish cognitive and visionary rapport with an intermediary world, with a mesocosm – with the world which Henry Corbin proposed to call the 'mundus imaginalis'." Modern Esoteric Spirituality (Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, editors)

25 "Imagination is the universal and indispensable instrument of all levels of living in the human world. Our daily lives are dependent on it….In fact, the principal function of the imagination is to enable the human being constantly to build thought models of the real world." Imagination (Harold Rugg)

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite