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		"For every essential energy within us, there is potentially an equal, opposite energy to balance it – for example, doing and being, giving and receiving, power and vulnerability. The more we can develop and embrace these opposites of life within ourselves, the more conscious, integrated, and balanced we become. Life is always guiding us in the direction that will help us develop the qualities that we most need." The Path of Transformation, How Healing Ourselves Can Change The World (Shakti Gawain)

2		"The all-containing Divine Essence…comprises all dichotomies. The Absolute becomes differentiated in polarized manifestations, and through these the vital tensions of the world-process are brought into existence and maintained." Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (Heinrich Zimmer, edited by Joseph Campbell)

3		"This focus of synthesis and unity, this resolution of dualities into greater, more inclusively loving wholes, is fundamental to the New Age." Soul Centered Astrology, A Key to Your Expanding Self (Alan Oken)

4		"I believe in the Word become flesh, in the spirit-filled body, where yang and yin are wedded into a living form." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

5		"Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable." The Gospel of Philip, (3rd century Christian Gnostic sacramental catechism) The Other Bible (Willis Barnstone, editor)

6		"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)

7		"The energy behind the elemental pair of opposites, fire and water, is one and the same." Hero With A Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)

8		"Everything in nature is dual and can only be known in contrast with its opposite, while the two in combination produce a metaphysical third which is their synthesis and perfect balance." The Meaning of Masonry (W. L. Wilmshurst)

9		"In God all opposites are abolished." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

10		"Man is a single Monad, uncompounded and indivisible, yet compounded and divisible; loving and at peace with all things yet warring with all things and at war with itself in all things; unlike and like itself, as it were a musical harmony containing all things;…showing forth all things and giving birth to all things." Hippolytus, 'Elenchos' VIII, 12, 5ff. Collected Works (Carl Jung)

11		"Every power in nature and in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole means and condition of its manifestation: and all opposition is a tendency to reunion." Samuel Taylor Coleridge Homage to Pythagoras, Rediscovering Sacred Science (Christopher Bamford, editor)

12		"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)

13		"The self is a union of opposites par excellence." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

14		"Most opposites, when stretched far enough apart, paradoxically come full circle only to be rejoined at some point of confluence, some moment or area of tenseless harmony." Breaking the Mind Barrier (Todd Siler)

15		"From the unreal to the real is not from one thing to another, but from the complexity of duality and multiplicity to the simplicity of unity." The Glorious Presence (Ernest E. Wood)

16		"The universe seems to be pervaded by pairs of opposites, but…they are not independent realities but rather polar aspects of the one unity, in which they are synthesized." Emily B. Sellon and Renee Weber, 'Theosophy and The Theosophical Society' Modern Esoteric Spirituality (Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, editors)

17		"Everything contains its opposite, as Heraclitus said long ago. 'Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre'. The poet Blake put it in more modern form, 'Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessay to human existence.'" The Springs of Creative Living, A Study of Human Nature and God (Rollo May)

18		"The psyche's movement to harmony and wholeness is a balancing of opposites." Spiritual Pilgrims, Carl Jung & Teresa of Avila (John Welch, O. Carm.)

19		"Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things." Heraclitus (540-480 bce), from 'Diogenes Laertius, 'Lives of Eminent Philosophers' Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (John Bartlett)

20		"Alchemical symbols have the function of uniting the opposites." Aurora Consurgens (Marie Louise vonFranz)

21		"The authentic selfhood of the human being is…alchemically integrated from the opposites of light and dark, good and evil, masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious. It is not by simple extension or a lineal path of growth, but by the oppositional conflict and eventual reconciliation of the opposites that the fullness of being is restored within the individual soul." The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Stephan A. Hoeller)

22		"Everything in nature is a blend of these two forces [yang and yin]. What is demanded is a holistic point of view so that an over-identification with either one of the terms is avoided. The light implies the dark, the male, the female – there is no absolute separation, for both create the whole…Within the whole which they comprise, the alternation of these two forces create the processes of nature and the entire universe, visible and invisible." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

23		"When you come to recognize that boundaries are illusions, and good and bad incline toward each other, and black and white are variations of light, the dualities dissolve and freedom reigns." Miraculous Living (Rabbi Shoni Labowitz)

24		"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)

25		"Only from indistinguishable night can the light be born. This is what nature and natural experience teach." Collected Works (Carl Jung)