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		"There is no excellence among the creatures which is not to be found in a much higher style, and as an archetype, in the Creator." Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) A Treasury of Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Dagobert D. Runes, editor)

2		"The archetypes, as organs of the psyche, are dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life to an extraordinary degree." Carl Jung, 'Psychological Commentary' Tibetan Book of the Dead (W Y Evans-Wentz, translator)

3		"Because these (archetypal) symbols are collective or transpersonal, to touch the archetype is actually to begin to transcend oneself, to find deeply within an intimation and pointer to the deeply beyond." Spectrum of Consciousness (Ken Wilber)

4		"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)

5		"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)

6		"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)

7		"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.)

8		"Instincts and archetypes share in common the fact of being essentially collective, that is, universal and regularly occurring." The Meaning in Dreams and Dreaming (Maria F. Mahoney)

9		"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)

10		"Appearing in dreams, fantasy, art, myth, and religion, and even in scientific thought, the archetypes design the entire field of human experience." Journey Into Consciousness: The Chakras, Tantra and Jungian Psychology (Charles Breaux)

11		"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)

12		"In the psyche, at a depth which cannot be called 'personal', there exist the great archetypal images. These images are demonstrably related to the true Archetypes; and although, in dreams for instance, they may sometimes move in the personal levels of the psyche and participate in actions which reflect personal conditions, still their more profound character is manifest." The Sword and The Serpent (Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips)

13		"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)

14		"The 'Ideal Forms' are the archetypal or formative ideas…the eternal and subjective concepts of things subsisting in the divine mind prior to becoming." The Secret Doctrine (Helena P. Blavatsky)

15		"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)

16		"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)

17		"For the mystics – Shankara, Plato, Augustine, Eckhart, Garab Dorje, and so on – archetypes are the first subtle forms that appear as the world manifests out of formless and unmanifested Spirit. They are the patterns upon which all other patterns of manifestation are based." Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber (Ken Wilber)

18		"The archetypes are abstract patterns formulated in the Divine Mind." The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall)

19		"This beautiful world is a reflection and an image of the Original, the Divine Spirit." Plotinus Men Who Have Walked With God (Sheldon Cheney)

20		"Plato arrived at the conclusion that there exists in a supra-sensible world a host of models or archetypes, immaterial, immutable, eternal, man in general or man in himself, triangle in itself, virtue in itself, etc. These he termed ideas, which are the object apprehended by the intellect, the faculty which attains truth – that is to say, they are Reality." An Introduction to Philosophy (Jacques Maritain)

21		"The psychosomatic entity that is everywhere being shaped – namely, the bioenergetic system of the one species, Homo sapiens sapiens – is and has been for some 40 millennia a constant. Hence, the 'elementary ideas' (Bastian) or 'archetypes of the collective unconscious (Jung), of this single species – which are biologically grounded and at once the motivating powers and connoted references of the historically conditioned metaphorical figures of mythologies throughout the world – are, like the laws of space, unchanged by changes of location." The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Joseph Campbell)

22		“Archetypes are universal themes – cross-cultural, transhistorical, and transreligious in world consciousness, i.e., in the collective Self.” Mary Within (David Richo)

23		"The archetypes of the collective unconscious are psychic components undergoing transformation in the direction of consciousness." Richard Roberts Tarot Revelations (Joseph Campbell & Richard Roberts)

24		"The archetype is a structural element of the psyche that we find everywhere and at all times; and it is that in which all individual psyches are identical with each other, and where they function as if they were the one undivided Psyche the ancients called 'anima mundi' [world soul]." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

25		"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)