ONE

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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One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from World Faiths
Matthew Fox
In this book I try to go to the core of human religious traditions as we know them to find the spirituality that is there. It is clear that once we return to the depth or core of religion we find much more than dogmas, concepts, institutions, commands. We find a striving for experience of the Divine, however that be spoken of, we find both form and formlessness, male and female, experience and practice. We also find that in their core and depth we do not encounter many different religions so much as one experience that is expressed variously and with great diversity and color flowing in the name of different traditions and cultures.

1		"Instant by instant the unvierse creates itself as a bonded community. To hear how omnipresent community is in the universe is to encourage our own difficult steps in community-building. The effort at community is an effort to imitate the universe. Therefore, it is a good effort. Therefore, it cannot fail."

2		"The seven principles that form the basis of Kwanza celebration all center around community. They include the following: self-determination for the community; collective work and responsibility; cooperative economics; the collective vocation of building the community; and creativity whose purpose is 'to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.'"

3		"The Celts all considered themselves children of a Great Mother Goddess."

4		"Beautiful you rise, O eternal living god! You are radiant, lovely, powerful. Your love is great, all-encompassing." Egyptian hymn, ca. 1550 bce

5		"Mechtild of Magdeburg said: 'God is not only fatherly. God is also mother who lifts her loved child from the ground to her knee.'"

6		"The earth is sacred. Therefore the actions of the earth are sacred. All things are interconnected."

7		"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."

8		"Everything teems with richness, everything aspires to ascend and be purified. Everything sings, celebrates, serves, develops, evolves, uplifts, aspires to be arranged in oneness." The Kabbalah

9		"The African universe is conceived as a unified spiritual totality….all being within it is organically interrelated and interdependent." Dona Richards, African-American philosopher

10		"In the Gospel of John, the Christ says: 'I am the true vine. I am the resurrection. I am the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the light of the world….I am the bread of life."

11		"Your existence, my dear, O love my dear, has been sealed and marked 'too sacred', 'too sacred', by the Beloved – to ever end! Indeed, God has written a thousand promises all over your heart that say, Life, life, life is far too sacred to ever end." Hafiz, 'God's Bucket'

12		"There is a fundamental structure of interrelatedness and interdependability inherent in all living things, at microscopic levels of existence and in human society….The origin and goal of community, therefore, is the Mind of God, which is coming to Itself in time." Walter E. Fluker

13		"From this beautiful One beauty comes to be in all beings." Thomas Aquinas

14		"God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop." Meister Eckhart

15		"For primal peoples, because the landscape itself is sacred it therefore embodies a divinity that it shares with everything that is part of nature, including human beings, animals, plants, rocks….everything." Jamake Highwater

16		"The Goddess in all her manifestations was a symbol of the unity of all life in Nature." Marija Gimbutas, 'The Language of the Goddess'

17		"God is a pure, clear One who is separate from all twoness." Meister Eckhart

18		"The Spirit is the supreme abode wherein dwells all that moves and breathes and sees….His radiance illumines all Creation." Mundaka Upanishad

19		"The glory of humanity is to be a brilliant mirror or image of Divinity."

20		"The Hindu Scriptures say: 'The Self is self-luminous, vibrant energy and vigor, vitality, power, tranquility, wisdom and love. This is who you really are.'"

21		"Each beautiful thing, a flower, the song of a bird, awakens in our soul the memory of our origin. Learn how to listen to the voice of beautiful things, to make us understand the voice of the soul." The Mevlevi Dervishes

22		"The Divinity we image is a light-filled, light-making, enlightening, warm, radiant, glorious face."

23		"My neighbor and I have the same origins; we have the same life-experience and a common destiny; we are the obverse and reverse sides of one entity; we are unchanging equals; we are the faces which see themselves in each other." The Zulu Personal Declaration of 1825

24		"Indeed, every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity."

25		"We all possess a little fragment of the first bit of life on earth. Consequently, everything that's alive is related." David Brower

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite