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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Collected Works
Carl Jung

1 "The circle, as the symbol of completeness and perfect being, is a widespread expression for heaven, sun, and God; it also expresses the primoridal image of man and the soul."

2 "The sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth."

3 "Archetypes, that is, universal and inherited patterns, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious….archetypes are the forms or river-beds along which the current of psychic life has always flowed."

4 "Wherever the spirit of God is extruded from our human calculations, an unconscious substitute takes its place." 'On the Nature of the Psyche'

5 “Meister Eckhart says:….’One with the One, One from the One, and in the One itself the One, eternally!’”

6 “In the one thing are hidden all parts.” Laurentius Ventura, 16th century Venetian physician

7 "In and from the Great World Book of Nature, there issues a continuous and everlasting doctrine for the wise and their children: indeed, it is a splendid living likeness of Jesus Christ, in and from the Great World which by nature is very similar to him (as to miraculous conception, birth, inexpressible powers, virtues, and effects); so God our Lord, besides his Son's Biblical histories, has also created a specific image and natural representation for us in the Book of Nature." Khunrath, medieval Alchemist, 'Hyl. Chaos'

8 “Caesarius of Heisterbach says that the soul has a ‘spherical nature.’”

9 "Myth is not fiction; it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again."

10 "The collective unconscious….is not individual but common to all men, and perhaps even to all animals, and is the true basis of the individual psyche."

11 "The opposites are necessarily of a characterilogical nature: the existence of a positive virtue implies victory over its opposite, the corresponding vice. Without its counterpart virtue would be pale, ineffective, and unreal." Mysterium Coniunctionis

12 "Myth is the primordial language natural to these (unconscious) psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery." 'Psychology and Alchemy'

13 "A species of magical power capable of transforming even brute matter dwells in the human mind." 'Psychology and Alchemy'

14 "The animate world is the larger circle, man is the smaller circle. He is the microcosm. Consequently, everything without is within, everything above is below. Between all things in the larger and smaller circles reigns 'correspondence'."

15 "The collective unconscious…is identical in all individuals and is therefore ONE."

16 “The world-soul pervades all things.”

17 "In the empirical self, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity."

18 "Let thy imagination be guided wholly by nature. And observe according to nature, through whom the substances regenerate themselves in the ..earth. And imagine this with true and not with fantastic imagination." Rosarium philosophorum, Art. Aurif., II, p. 214 (medieval alchemical text),

19 "It seems that nature is out to prod man's consciousness towards greater expansion and greater clarity."

20 "The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious life - as well as in the life that transcends consciousness - of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny." 'A Psychological Approach to the Trinity'

21 “The spirit of life is not only indwelling in all living things, but immanent in everything that exists, as the world-soul.”

22 "All pristine things…have a touching, magical beauty, for in its nascent state each thing after its kind is the most precious, the most desirable, the tenderest thing in the world, being a reflection of the infinite love and goodness of the Creator."

23 “Pelagios asks: ‘Why speak ye of the manifold matter? The substance of natural things is one.’”

24 "Mandalas…are produced spontaneously, without external influence, even by children and adults who have never come into contact with any such ideas….The mandala symbolizes, by its central point, the ultimate unity of all archetypes as well as the multiplicity of the phemonenal world, and is therefore the empirical equivalent of the metaphysical concept of a 'unus mundus' [one world]."

25 "God made man to partake of his glory and created him in his image."

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite