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		"The operations of the two contraries produce harmony, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which are necessary to each other – mutually interdependent – in order that both should live." The Secret Doctrine (Helena P. Blavatsky)

2		"Just as the coal and diamond are both carbon – that basic substance of life – so does the Goddess of Wisdom manifest her power through seemingly opposing appearances. The Goddess of Wisdom is seeded within all." Caitlin Matthews, 'Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom' The Inner West, An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West (Jay Kinney, editor)

3		"In the view of Nicolas of Cusa, the mystery of God's infinity is best expressed by affirming that in God all contradictions are somehow reconciled." The Great Ideas, A Syntopicon, vol. 1 (Mortimer J. Adler, editor)

4		"God is the very spirit and nature of the universe, the image in which it is created, and knowable thus by sense, by reason, and by love, in gradual approximation. God is in all and in every part, and in him all opposites, including good and evil, coincide." The Masks of God (Joseph Campbell)

5		"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)

6		"Our inner development as persons comes about as we are able to bear the wholeness of the opposites, to experience them as mutually completing, as interdependent and interpenetrating, in some sense simultaneous. To see them, in other words, as alive, moving, and interweaving, like the distinct and yet interflowing rivers that course through the oceans." Mary Caroline Richards, poet and teacher, 'Separating and Connecting: The Vessel and the Fire' The Fabric of the Future (M. J. Ryan, editor)

7		"Opposites are fundamentally of the one essence, two aspects of the one Vishnu." Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (Heinrich Zimmer, edited by Joseph Campbell)

8		"Our mind divides the world into heaven and earth, day and night, light and darkness, right and left, man and woman, I and you – and the more strongly we sense the separation between these poles, whatever they may be, the more powerfully do we also sense their unity." Karl Menninger (1892-1990), American psychiatrist A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art & Science (Michael S. Schneider)

9		"The harmony of the world arises from opposites held in tension, as in the lyre and the bow. What depths are hidden in this image! By the harmonizing of divergent forces, unity is attained." The Essential Steiner (Rudolf Steiner, edited by Robert A. McDermott)

10		"All of life is built upon the law of opposites, as in the negative and positive poles of electricity, day and night, heat and cold, summer and winter, good and evil. The constant friction between these opposites causes development, change, adjustment – in other words originality, or the free-will which functions throughout all creation, and through which creation itself learns eventually to become creative." The Finding of the Third Eye (Vera Stanley Alder)

11		"Becoming conscious reconciles the opposites." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

12		"There is no energy without opposites." C. G. Jung: Letters, 1951-1961 (Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, editors)

13		"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)

14		"The healthy soul, whether a man's, a woman's, or a culture's, is equally male and female, as Jung insisted: the Yin and the Yang; the animus and the anima; the male and the female; the sun and the moon – these elements of our psyches are meant to work together within each of us, not at odds." WHEE! We, wee All the Way Home (Matthew Fox)

15		"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)

16		"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)

17		"All seeming opposites are other faces of the one supreme drive toward creativity." The Nature of Personal Reality (Jane Roberts)

18		"Our individual natures are manifestations of the unfolding movement of the yin and yang principles, which in turn encompass and represent every opposite that exists. Yang represents light; yin dark. Yang represents male; yin female. Each opposite produces the other, and in their entirety they encompass the Tao, or the Way." The Mystic Hours, A Daybook of Interspiritual Wisdom & Devotion (Wayne Teasdale)

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

20		"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)

21		"Every moment of this strange and lovely life from dawn to dusk, is a miracle. Somewhere, always, a rose is opening its petals to the dawn. Somewhere, always, a flower is fading in the dusk. The incense that rises with the sun, and the scents that die in the dark, are all gathered, sooner or later, into the solitary fragrance that is God. Faintly, elusively, that fragrance lingers over all of us." Beverly Nichols, 'The Fool Hath Said' Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations (Frank S Mead, editor)

22		"If history reveals anything it is that dissolution and growth have been aspects of the same phenomenon. Growth has not occurred anywhere without involving dissolution. Every major cultural change throughout history has involved this two-fold process of death and emergence." Bernard Eugene Meland (b. 1899), American philosopher and professor of religion, from an article in 'The Personalist' The Choice Is Always Ours (Dorothy B. Phillips, Chief Editor)

23		"When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion." A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Diane K. Osbon, editor)

24		"It is the Mandala that can burst the fetters of man's internal bondage and conflict by leading him to a viewpoint from which the various polarities may be harmonized." Mandala (Jose and Miriam Arguelles)

25		"In the self all opposites – conscious and unconscious, psyche and physis, and so on – unite." Aurora Consurgens (Marie Louise vonFranz)