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 "Symbolically, in the infinite ocean of light, with centre everywhere and with circumference nowhere, there arises a full-orbed sphere of living light, a Logos, and the surface of the sphere is His will to limit Himself that He may become manifest, His veil in which He incloses Himself that within it a universe may take form." The Ancient Wisdom (Annie Besant)

2 "Everything is to be brought within the circle of Love." From the Outer Court to the Inner Sanctum (Annie Besant)

3 "In nature the One circle gives rise to the Many, in the shapes and orbits of the planets, in the roundness of berries, nests, eyeballs, and the cycles of time." A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

4 "They [mandalas] are among the oldest religious symbols of humanity and may even have existed in paleolithic times (cf. the Rhodesian rock paintings). Moreover they are distributed all over the world." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

5 “The elements are conjoined in the circle of true friendship.” Petrus Bonus Collected Works (Carl Jung)

6 "The sun makes of our planet an alchemical retort in which the ocean waters are lifted to heaven and then, their impurities distilled away, are returned to the earth in drops of rain. This continuous circular process epitomizes the natural interrelationship between heaven and earth – between the archetypal figures of the collective unconscious and man's ego reality." Sallie Nichols, Jungian author Angels and Mortals, Their Co-Creative Power (Maria Parisen, compiler)

7 "I believe we can apply consciousness to heal the world – and we already are. Great power lies within us. What has been missing is the mechanism for organizing this power. I believe this mechanism of empowerment and action is THE CIRCLE." Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture (Christina Baldwin)

8 "The Mandala has appeared throughout man's history as a universal and essential symbol of integration, harmony, and transformation. It gives form to the most primordial intuition of the nature of reality, an intuition that inheres in each of us, giving us life." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

9 "Deity and the cosmos may be likened to a circle or sphere whose circumference is nowhere – hence boundless – but those center is everywhere. And each monad is such a divine, immortal, preexistent center." Editors Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery (Cranston/Head, editors)

10 "We need to worship in circles again, preferably on the soil of Mother Earth wherever possible. Circles invite all creatures to be part of the grateful event and they allow the humans present to look each other in the eye while rounding and connecting themselves in step with the universe." The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (Matthew Fox)

11 "If we study the introspective method of medieval natural philosophy, we find that it repeatedly used the circle, and in most cases the circle divided into four parts, to symbolize the central principle." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

12 "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]." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

13 "If man has alienated himself from the source, the center within, then it is the purpose of a Mandala ritual for our time to be used as a primal tool for investigating and opening that center, once again granting the individual an identification with the cosmic forces and their source." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

14 "The mandala…portrays an autonomous psychic fact, characterized by a phenomenology which is always repeating itself and is everywhere the same. It seems to be a sort of atomic nucleus." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

15 "The mandala is a symbol which combines both the journey and its destination, the ideas of differentiation and the oneness of all things, the 'unus mundus'. Examples still persist from Paleolithic times as, for instance, in Rhodesian rock engravings. Such images, when they occur in modern dreams, are thus spontaneous re-creations of the most basic religious symbol known to humanity." Ariadne's Clue, A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind (Anthony Stevens)

16 "In a twelfth-century hermetic text known as 'The Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers' there is a statement that has been quoted, through the centuries, by a number of Christian thinkers – among others, Alan of Lille (1128-1202), Nicholas Cusanus (1401-1464), Rabelais (1490?-1553), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), and Pascal (1632-1662), as well as Voltaire (1694-1778); to wit: 'God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.'" Joseph Campbell Tarot Revelations (Joseph Campbell & Richard Roberts)

17 "Well, there is something magical about a circle. For one thing, geometrically it encompasses more space than any other shape. But this is just a mathematical beginning. The circle is also profoundly symbolic, for a circle travels without leave-taking. So it combines journeying with returning. It's powerful in bringing the two together." The Way Things Are (Huston Smith, edited by Phil Cousineau)

18 "The mandala is the central symbol of individuation, integration, or wholeness. One could say that a key component of the transformation of vision in psychospiritual development is the perceiving of the visual field as a kind of mandala. American Indian vision seekers have reported that they see the 'circle of the Sky' touch the 'circle of the Earth', forming one great hoop…it is Buckminster Fuller's sphere of 'omnidirectional awareness', moving always with us." The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience (Ralph Metzner)

19 "The circle with the point in the centre is symbolic of the perfected man. He is rounded out; he is inclusive both vertically (soul contact) and horizontally (human relationship)." The Rays and The Initiations (Alice A. Bailey)

20 "Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: 'Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation.' And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality." Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Carl Jung (edited by Aniela Jaffe))

21 "The mandals [is] a sacred, mystical symbol of the universe." Breaking the Mind Barrier (Todd Siler)

22 "The hidden potential within the single fertilized cell from which the entire structure of a human arises is a mirror in miniature of the creation." The Hidden Face of God: How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth (Gerald L. Schroeder, Ph.D.)

23 "The point signifies unity, the Origin and the Centre. It also represents the principles of manifestation and emanation, and hence in some mandalas the centre is not actually shown but must be imagined….There are two kinds of point to be considered: that which has no magnitude and is symbolic of creative virtue, and that which – as suggested by Raymond Lull in his 'Nova Geometria' – has the smallest conceivable or practicable magnitude and is a symbol of the principle of manifestation." A Dictionary of Symbols (J. E. Cirlot)

24 "God fashioned the sphere of light round himself. 'God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere'(cf. St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium, 5). The point symbolizes light and fire, also the Godhead in so far as light is an 'image of God' or an 'exemplar of the Deity.' This spherical light modelled on the point is also the shining or illuminating body that dwells in the heart of man." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

25 "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)

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite