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		"Archetypes are vital to understanding and defining who we are, individual expressions of a collective consciousness." Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire (Deepak Chopra)

2		"Growth at all levels must include spiritual development as its most subtle and valuable aspect. The life of the spirit, manifest in the psyche, must evolve in accordance with certain principles and forms, which, in turn, must be related to all the other levels of human existence...to designate these principles and forms Jung has adopted the term 'archetypes.' Violet Staub deLaszlo, introduction Basic Writings of C G Jung (V S DeLasslo, editor)

3		"Ideas are certain original forms or permanent and immutable models of things which are contained by the divine intelligence. They are immutable because they themselves have not been formed; and that is why they are eternal and always the same. But though they themselves neither come to be nor perish, yet it is accordfing to them that everything, which can come to be or pass away or which actually comes to be and passes away, is said to be formed." St. Augustine, Lib. 83 Quaest., q. 46 Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas (Anton C. Pegis, editor)

4		"The greatest and best thoughts of man shape themselves upon these primoridial images (the archetypes) as upon a blueprint." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

5		"Archetypal means a pattern which is universal and existent in all people in all cultures at all periods of history." The Mythic Tarot (Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene)

6		"The word 'archetype' is derived from the Greek prefix which signifies a first or primal cause….The word is best taken for the numinous or abstract principle behind any thing or group of things in the phenomenal world. Being thus Numinous or Essential, it is not extended in space-time, but is what we would call a mathematical point with neither size or time-extension." The Transforming Mind (Laurence and Phoebe Bendit)

7		"Symbols, images, and archetypes…are the key regulators and main 'switches' of human consciousness and of one's inner life. It is through them that all alterations, focusing, and expansion of human consciousness take place, for they are the regulators, accumulators, and transformers of human consciousness. They enable a person to connect himself (and his field of consciousness) temporarily and to identify with something greater and larger than he is and, thus, slowly to transcend himself and actualize his latent energies, faculties, and potentialitites." Divine Light and Fire, Experiencing Esoteric Christianity (Peter Roche deCoppens)

8		"Since the archetypes, or elementary ideas, are not limited in their distributions by cultural or even linguistic boundaries, they cannot be defined as culturally determined." The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Joseph Campbell)

9		"The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light." A Greater Psychology, An Introduction to Sri Aurobindo's Psychological Thought (Sri Aurobindo, edited by A. S. Dalal)

10		"Everything which will later become this or that particular thing is contained invisibly in the seminal reasons implanted at creation; the world blooms out of its primitive elements as a tree develops from its seed." Richard McKeon, introduction to St. Augustine Selections From Medieval Philosophers (Richard McKeon, editor and translator)

11		"Archetypes are forms of different aspects expressing the creative psychic background. They are and always have been numinous and therefore 'divine.' In a very generalizing way we can therefore define them as attributes of the creator. That would explain the compelling character of such inner perceptions." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

12		"Archetypes are the architects of our lives. They are the energy companions through whom we can learn to understand ourselves." Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential (Caroline Myss)

13		"As the intellectual historian Richard Tarnas points out,'Platonic Forms are not conceptual abstractions that the human mind creates by generalizing from a class of particulars. Rather, they possess a quality of being, a degree of reality that is superior to that of the concrete world. Platonic archetypes form the world and also stand beyond it. They manifest themselves within time and yet are timeless. They constitute the veiled essence of things.'" Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential (Caroline Myss)

14		"The material world illustrates for us the Archetypal Powers in action, and then the pattern of the Archetypal Powers gives us a further clue by which we can penetrate more deeply into the lessons of the material world without losing our way." The Sword and The Serpent (Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips)

15		"As our soul contemplates its Archetype, so that Archetype in turn contemplates the One, which is its Source." Plotinus Shadows of the Sacred: Seeing Through Spiritual Illusions (Frances Vaughan, Ph.D.)

16		"In its created being (the soul) incessantly receives the impress of its Eternal Archetype, like a flawless mirror, in which the image remains steadfast and in which the reflection is renewed without interruption by its ever-new reception in new light." John of Ruysbroeck, 'Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage' Behold the Spirit, A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion (Alan Watts)

17		"This world is but the shadow of God….All that is in the invisible archetypal sphere is revealed in the sensible corporeal world by the light of Nature." The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall)

18		"The extraordinary degree of similarity between symbolic manifestations and the agreement about what they signify across history and across the planet points to their archetypal roots in the phylogenetic psyche (the collective unconscious) of humanity." Ariadne's Clue, A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind (Anthony Stevens)

19		"Archetypes, that is, universal and inherited patterns, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious….archetypes are the forms or river-beds along which the current of psychic life has always flowed." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

20		"In myths and fairytales, as in dreams, the psyche tells its own story, and the interplay of the archetypes is revealed in its natural setting as 'formation, transformation/the eternal Mind's eternal recreation.'" Collected Works (Carl Jung)

21		"Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images." The Gospel of Philip (3rd century ad Christian Gnostic catechesis) The Other Bible (Willis Barnstone, editor)

22		"The essential realizations of the pivotal work of Jung's career were, first, that since the archetypes or norms of myth are common to the human species, they are inherently expressive neither of local social circumstance nor of any individual's singular experience, but of common human needs, instincts, and potentials." Joseph Campbell, 'The Portable Jung' Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (Ken Wilber)

23		"Evolution systematically reveals the divine archetypes, the Ideas of Plato. Forms unfold through evolution according to the pattern impressed on them by the archetype that governs their particular structure." Ancient Wisdom, Modern Insight (Shirley Nicholson)

24		"The ancient mathematical philosophers probed into the archetypal patterns and found them in nature." A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

25		"Long ago Plato saw love, concrete human love, as one of the supreme and most adequate methods of giving us ecstasy and of opening us to a knowledge of the Ideas, of the spiritual world." Companions on the Inner Way (Morton T. Kelsey)