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		"He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery." Anne Frank (1929-1945), 'The Diary of a Young Girl', March 7, 1944

2		"Religion…is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people." Ernest Renan (1823-1892), 'Les Apotres'

3		"Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can." John Wesley (1703-1791), 'John Wesley's Rule'

4		"The Infinite Goodness has such wide arms that it takes whatever turns to it." Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), 'The Divine Comedy'

5		"The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens." Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), 'Letters to a Young Poet'

6		"Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles." Confucius (551-479 bce), 'The Confucian Analects', bk. 1:3

7		"All Nature wears one universal grin." Henry Fielding (1707-1754), 'Tom Thumb', act I, sc. 1

8		"We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar….Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out." William James (1842-1910), 'The Principles of Psychology'

9		"From the feelings proper to it, humanity's nature is constituted for the practice of what is good." Mencius (372-289 bce), 'Works', bk. 1:6.5-6

10		"What is (the earth) most like?.....It is most like a single cell." Lewis Thomas (b. 1913), 'The Lives of a Cell'

11		"Philosophy is written in this grand book – I mean the universe – which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth." Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), 'Il Saggiatore'

12		"We cannot in any better manner glorify the Lord and Creator of the universe than that in all things, how small soever they appear to our naked eyes, but which have yet received the gift of life and power of increase, we contemplate the display of his omnificence and perfections with the utmost admiration." Anton vanLeeuwenhoeck (1632-1723), 'Select Works'

13		"God gave the breath of life to their (humanity's) noses, for they are likenesses of Him which issued from His flesh." 'The Teaching for Merikare', par. 22 (ca. 2135-2040 bce), a treatise on kingship addressed by a king of Heracleopolis, whose name is lost, to his son and successor Merikare

14		"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'

15		"I see on an immense scale, and as clearly as in a demonstration in a laboratory, that good comes out of evil; that the impartiality of the Nature Providence is best; that we are made strong by what we overcome." John Burroughs (1837-1921), 'Accepting the Universe'

16		"The final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands." Anne Frank (1929-1945), 'The Diary of a Young Girl', July 15, 1944

17		"Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output….In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect – the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York." James Gleick (b. 1954), 'Chaos', prologue

18		"Soul is the same thing in all living creatures, although the body of each is different." Hippocrates (460-377 bce), 'Regimen', bk. 1, sec. 28

19		"Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament which the Great First Cause endued with animality….and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end? Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), grandfather of Charles Darwin, 'Zoonomia'

20		"A land ethic for tomorrow should be as honest as Thoreau's 'Walden', and as comprehensive as the sensitive science of ecology. It should stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help logic of the great chain of life." Stewart Lee Udall (b. 1920), 'The Quiet Crisis'

21		"God is Love – I dare say." Samuel Butler (1835-1902), 'God Is Love',

22		"Zeus, first cause, prime mover; for what thing without Zeus is done among mortals?" Aeschylus (525-456 bce), 'Agamemnon', 1.1485

23		"What is God? Everything." Pindar (518-438 bce), Fragment 140d

24		"If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up." Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevski (1821-1881), 'The Brothers Karamazov', bk. II, ch. 6

25		"There are no dead." Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), 'The Blue Bird', act IV, sc. ii