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		"All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us." 'The Structure of the Psyche'

2		"It seems to me that we are at the threshold of a new spiritual epoch. I do not wish to pass myself off as a prophet, but one can hardly attempt to sketch the spiritual problem of modern man without mentioning the longing for rest in a period of unrest, the longing for security in an age of insecurity. It is from need and distress that new forms of existence arise."

3		“In the one thing are hidden all parts.” Laurentius Ventura, 16th century Venetian physician

4		"Just as in me, a single individual, the darkness calls forth a helpful light, so it does in the psychic life of a people."

5		"The physicist's models ultimately rest on the same archetypal foundations that also underlie the speculations of the theologian."

6		"A movement that grips a whole nation must have matured in every individual as well."

7		"Our own psyche [is] constantly at work creating new spiritual forms and spiritual forces which may help us."

8		"The sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth."

9		"That which brings division ultimately creates union."

10		"The manifold religious practices and beliefs which, from the earliest times, have played such an enormous role in history cannot be traced back to the whimsical fancies and opinions of individuals, but owe their existence far more to the influence of unconscious powers which we cannot neglect without disturbing the psychic balance."

11		"Like the related ideas of 'atman' and 'tao' in the East, the idea of the self is at least in part a product of cognition, grounded neither on faith nor on metaphysical speculation but on the experience that under certain conditions the unconscious spontaneously brings forth an archetypal symbol of wholeness."

12		"To know where the other person makes a mistake is of little value. It only becomes interesting when you know where YOU make the mistake, for then you can do something about it."

13		"We must awaken our innermost wisdom, pure and divine, called the Mind of Buddha…It is the divine light, the inner heaven, the key to all moral treasures, the centre of thought and consciousness,..the seat of kindness, justice, sympathy, impartial love, humanity, and mercy, the measure of all things. When this innermost wisdom is fully awakened, we are able to realize that each and every one of us is identical in spirit, in essence, in nature with the universal life." Kaiten Nukariya, professor at the So-To-shu Buddhist College in Tokyo

14		"However we may picture the relationship between God and soul, one thing is certain: that the soul cannot be 'nothing but'. On the contrary it has the dignity of an entity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity." 'Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy'

15		"There are powerful forces at work which in the end destroy all that is violent and unjust, and consequently it does not pay to build on false principles."

16		"Wholeness wants to be transformed from a latent state of unconsciousness into an approximate consciousness of itself."

17		"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."

18		"Behind the opposites and in the opposites is true reality, which sees and comprehends the whole."

19		"They are all from the One, and of the One, and with the One, which is the root of itself." 'Rosarium Philosophorem', medieval Alchemical text

20		"The God-image is within….Where the understanding is, where the mind is, where the power of investigating truth is, there God has his image.' St. Augustine, 'Enarrationes in Psalmos', XLVIII, Sermo II"

21		"Self-knowledge is not an isolated process; it is possible only if the reality of the world around us is recognized at the same time."

22		“’As all things proceed from the One….so all things are born of this one thing’, says the ‘Tabula smaragdina’.”

23		"Let now the savage instincts sleep and all the violence they do; when human love stirs in the deep, the love of God is stirring too." Goethe, 'Faust'

24		"Wisdom never forgets that all things have two sides."

25		"The point is identical with the scintilla, the 'little soul-spark' of Meister Eckhart. We find it already in the teachings of Saturninus. Similarly Heraclitus is said to have conceived the soul as a 'spark of stellar essence.' Hippolytus says that in the doctrine of the Sethians the darkness 'held the brightness and the spark of light in thrall', and that this 'smallest of sparks' was finely mingled in the dark waters below….Alchemy, too, has its doctrine of the scintilla. It is the fiery centre of the earth, where the four elements 'project their seed in ceaseless movement'….In the centre dwells the Archaeus, the servant of nature, whom Paracelsus also calls Vulcan, identifying him with the Adech, the 'great man.'"