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 form the world and also stand beyond it. They manifest themselves within time and yet are timeless. They constitute the veiled essence of things." The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (Richard Tarnas)

2		"Ultimately every archetype is merely an individual expression of one Universal energy pattern, which is our connection to the Divine." C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D., Foreword Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential (Caroline Myss)

3		"The archetype is an archetype because it represents a past reality; its power over us as internal image is so profound because it was once an experienced fact of the external world." Great Cosmic Mother, Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor)

4		"These form-giving principles (archetypes) of the mind spell out the features of an inner world with its own significance and reality, a topos of the soul connecting the mind inwardly with its source and allowing it to experience the larger transpersonal world that creates and sustains it." The Strong Eye of Shamanism, A Journey Into the Caves of Consciousness (Robert E. Ryan, Ph.D.)

5		"If these primal spiritual forces – these archetypal powers – can work through the collective unconscious to touch and influence [us] through our myth and ritual and imagination, including imaginative prayer, then we can in actual fact alter the course of history." Myth, History & Faith (Morton Kelsey)

6		"The archetypal world is 'eternal', i.e., outside time, and it is everywhere." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

7		"Archetypal images are found in virtually all cultures and during all ages, thus representing a kind of universal language." The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience (Ralph Metzner)

8		"The archetypes have a life of their own which extends through the centuries and gives the aeons their peculiar stamp." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

9		"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)

10		"The unconscious, as the totality of all archetypes, is the deposit of all human experience right back to its remotest beginnings. Not, indeed, a dead deposit, a sort of abandoned rubbish-heap, but a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual's life in invisible ways." Collected Works (Carl Jung)

11		"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.)

12		"The archetype of the human being is God…'God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him' (Genesis 1:27)." Covenant of the Heart, Meditations of a Christian Hermeticist on the Mysteries of Tradition (Valentin Tomberg)

13		"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)

14		"Space is not an empty void, but a reservoir filled with the models of all things that ever were, that are, and that will be." Isis Unveiled (Helena P. Blavatsky)

15		"Each god has his sympathetic representative in the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral world." Proclus (410-485ad), Greek philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (John Farina, Editor-in-Chief)

16		"Number should not be understood solely as a construction of consciousness, but also as an archetype and thus as a constituent of nature both within and without." Marie Louise vonFranz A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

17		"To the opened eye of the seer all nature is but a symbol, a partial and dim expression of the radiant beauty of the archetypes in the Divine Mind." Ancient Wisdom, Modern Insight (Shirley Nicholson)

18		"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)

19		"Ideas are the original forms (formae principales), the stable and immutable ground of things….They are a part of divine intelligence." Modern Esoteric Spirituality (Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, editors)

20		"The archetypes serve as blueprints to guide the growing forms. They are like the perfect song on a conceptual level which individual singers bring into being in their unique way." Ancient Wisdom, Modern Insight (Shirley Nicholson)

21		"Mandalas are also formed with the hands, danced, and represented in music (for instance Bach's 'Art of Fugue')….When a mandala is being formed, everything round and square known to man works on it too. But the impetus for its formation comes from the unconscious archetype." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

22		"Underlying reality there is a world of archetypes, and reproductions of these make up the real things in the material world. The world of archetypes is heaven, the world of reproductions is the earth: there energy, here matter; there the Creative, here the Receptive. But it is the same tao [way] that is active both in the Creative and in the Receptive." I Ching or The Book of Changes (Richard Wilhelm, translator)

23		"The point of archetypal images, like the point of myths, is not problem solving but imagining, questioning, going deeper. Archetypal images free us from identifying ourselves with our literal failures and successes or from seeing our lives as banal, or trivial. The aim in attending to these images is to awaken us to a sense of our yet unrealized latent possibilities, to save us from our sense of isolation and meaninglessness. It is to open up our lives to renewal and reshaping. Attending to the images creates a new bond between our personal lives and the collective experience of humankind." Mirrors of The Self, Archetypal Images That Shape Your Life (Christine Downing, editor)

24		"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)

25		"We can relate to almost every archetype because our psyches and spirits are connected to the great collective of all the archetypal patterns." Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential (Caroline Myss)