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		"Everything in the observable universe responds to an essential union of two opposites, a male and a female principle. From the miracle of electricity to the duality of night and day, everything is harmoniously based on a negative-positive principle." Kabbalah for the Modern World (Migene Gonzalez-Wippler)

2		"God appeared to me as the highest unity of all contrasts." Letter of Nicholas of Cusa to Cardinal Julianus Mystics after Modernism (Rudolf Steiner)

3		"Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows like harmony in music; there is a dark inscrutable workmanship that reconciles discordant elements." William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet, 'The Prelude' The Great Thoughts (George Seldes, compiler)

4		"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)

5		"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)

6		"Through all the contraries of phenomenality the Uncreate-Imperishable remains, and there is nothing to fear." Hero With A Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)

7		"Polarities are but the two extremes perceptible to us of one and the same motion." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

8		"As the interaction and eventual coalescence of the opposites seems to rule the macrocosm of the universe, so it also appears to govern the life of the psyche." The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Stephan A. Hoeller)

9		"Duality and the opposites are, in short, terms of relation or of thought, but not of reality." Spectrum of Consciousness (Ken Wilber)

10		"The One…will again reassert his soverign claim, and gather all the fragmented and estranged shreds of being into the reconciled opposites of the one Word." Earthy Mysticism: Contemplation and the Life of Passionate Presence (William McNamara)

11		"From the living comes death, and from the dead, life; from the young, old age; and from the old, youth; from waking, sleep; and from sleep, waking; the stream of creation and decay never stands still….Construction and destruction, destruction and construction – this is the norm which rules in every circle of natural life from the smallest to the greatest. Just as the cosmos itself emerged from the primal, so must it return once more into the same – a double process running its measured course through vast periods, a drama eternally re-enacted." Heraclitus Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning (Ira Progoff, Ph.D.)

12		"Non-dual knowledge is the abolition of all particular view points which restrict and distort reality." T. R. V. Murti, 'Central Philosophy of Buddhism' Spectrum of Consciousness (Ken Wilber)

13		"The world as unity of opposites, from the formed towards the forming, is essentially a world from present to present; the moment of the eternal present which is the unity of opposites." Kitaro Nishida, 'Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness', East-West Press 1958 Spectrum of Consciousness (Ken Wilber)

14		"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)

15		"Growth and decay, life and death, are both opposites and yet contained, even embraced, by a continuum." Return of the Goddess (Edward C. Whitmont, MD)

16		"Pluralism is illusory, since all separate forms originate in the indistinguishable oneness of the psychic matrix, deep down in the unconscious." C. G. Jung, Psychological Commentary The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (W. Y. Evans-Wentz, compiler and editor)

17		"Creation and destruction are simultaneous. Degeneration carries renewal in its core….there is a level in Nature at which all extremes become reconciled and merged." Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On The Mechanics of Consciousness (Itzhak Bentov)

18		"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)

19		"The Book of Manu declares: 'Whoso holds himself free from the opposites, that one is redeemed.'" The Garden of the Golden Flower, The Journey to Spiritual Fulfilment (Longfield Beatty)

20		"Once you have brought bondage to the dyad into subjection to the dignity and nature of the One, you will have subjected the whole of creation to God; for you will have brought into unity what was divided and will have reconciled all things." Nikitas Stithatos, 'On Spiritual Knowledge' The Philokalia, volume 4 (various authors, compiled by St. Nikodimos and St. Makarios)

21		"It is a fact that symbols, by their very nature, can so unite the opposites that these no longer diverge or clash, but mutually supplement one another and give meaningful shape to life." Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Carl Jung (edited by Aniela Jaffe))

22		"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)

23		"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)

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		"Experience has amply confirmed that, in the psyche as in nature, a tension of opposites creates a potential which may express itself at any time in a manifestation of energy. Between above and below flows the waterfall, and between hot and cold there is a turbulent exchange of molecules. Similarly, between the psychic opposites there is generated a uniting symbol." Collected Works (Carl Jung)