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		"Every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the 'third'. In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

2		"'True reality', according to Marcus Schneider, 'resides only in the synthesis' of opposites. This is what the Tarot message is all about, and it certainly is the capsule meaning not only of alchemy and astrology but also of Jungian psychology." Tarot Revelations (Joseph Campbell & Richard Roberts)

3		"Life is about light and darkness, joy and emptiness, pain and praise." Matthew Fox Sheer Joy, Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality (Matthew Fox)

4		"In a world that is split, divided by the 'Civil War of Man', healing is needed to make whole. Mandala is a whole-ing technique; it is the alchemy of opposites reuniting, a blueprint that can be placed upon anything, or any man or being." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

5		"Behind the opposites and in the opposites is true reality, which sees and comprehends the whole." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

6		"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order, in all caprice a fixed law, for everything that works is grounded on its opposite." 'Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious', CW 9, 1 Basic Writings of C G Jung (V S DeLasslo, editor)

7		"Represent Unity by a circle; at the Present Moment, outside Time, a scission occurs and forms two streams: one goes to the left, away from the other, which goes to the right; each runs on a half of the circle, the Chinese Yin and Yang. On the opposite side, the antagonists rediscover each other and unite. The circle, or cycle, has never ceased to be, the scission has broken nothing…..This absurdity is the Truth." R. A. Schwaller deLubicz, 'Nature Word', Lindisfarne Nature Word (R. A. Schwaller deLubicz)

8		"Everything in nature is cyclical and opposites are in balance. In the natural world you have opposites, like day and night, but they're not in opposition; they're complements to each other. They're part of one whole, and you have to have both. One isn't 'good' and the other 'evil'. The more that we can start to look at the world in this way again, the more integrated we can be." Starhawk, author and founding minister of the Covenant of the Goddess, 'Envisioning the Future' The Fabric of the Future (M. J. Ryan, editor)

9		"God appeared to me as the highest unity of all contrasts." Letter of Nicholas of Cusa to Cardinal Julianus Mystics after Modernism (Rudolf Steiner)

10		"Proponents of these diverse (Gnostic) views agreed that the divine is to be understood in terms of a harmonious, dynamic relationship of opposites – a concept that may be akin to the Eastern view of yin and yang." The Gnostic Gospels (Elaine Pagels)

11		"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)

12		"'That' which makes of all the contraries a loving union of opposites, 'you are'." The Flame and the Light (Hugh I'anson Fausset)

13		"Two souls contend…In me and both sould strive for masterdom…Which from the other shall the other shall the scepter rend…The first soul is a lover, clasping close…to this world tentacles of corporal flame…The other seeks to rise with mighty throes…To those ancestral meadows, whence it came." Faust (Goethe)

14		"Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites?" Socrates The Case for Reincarnation (Joe Fisher)

15		"There is no energy without opposites." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

16		"The One…will again reassert his soverign claim, and gather all the fragmented and estranged shreds of being into the reconciled opposites of the one Word." Earthy Mysticism: Contemplation and the Life of Passionate Presence (William McNamara)

17		"The rational mind stresses opposites. Compassion and love go beyond pairs of opposites." A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Diane K. Osbon, editor)

18		"Polar tension occurs in all natural and human affairs as any opposing relationship, contrast, difference. It is at the root of our pernicious notion of separateness from each other, from nature, and from our own inherent divinity. The paradox of the Dyad (polarity) is that while it appears to separate from unity, its opposite poles remember their source and attract each other in an attempt to merge and return to that state of unity." A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

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

20		"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)

21		"Every psychic phenomenon is compensated by its opposite, in agreement with the proverb, 'There is no misfortune so great that no good may come of it.'" Collected Works (Carl Jung)

22		"The emergence of the mandala in the spiritual and artistic imagination of various pioneering figures of our century anticipates a new consciousness that can contain these opposites simultaneously." Michael Flanagin, Ph.D., 'The Mandala in Jungian Psychotherapy' Mandala, Luminous Symbols for Healing (Judith Cornell, Ph.D.)

23		"Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows like harmony in music; there is a dark inscrutable workmanship that reconciles discordant elements." William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet, 'The Prelude' The Great Thoughts (George Seldes, compiler)

24		"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)

25		"Growth and decay, life and death, are both opposites and yet contained, even embraced, by a continuum." Return of the Goddess (Edward C. Whitmont, MD)