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		"To overcome every obstacle, to unite our beings without loss of individual personality, there is a single force which nothing can replace and nothing destroy, a force which urges us forwards and draws us upwards: this is the force of love."

2		"The more I examine myself, the more I discover this psychological truth: that no one lifts his little finger to do the smallest task unless moved, however obscurely, by the conviction that he is contributing infinitesimally (at least indirectly) to the building of something definite – that is to say, to your work, my God."

3		"Christ of glory, hidden power stirring in the heart of matter, glowing centre in which the unnumbered strands of the manifold are knit together; whose brow is of snow, whose eyes are of fire, whose feet are more dazzling than gold poured from the furnace; you whose hands hold captive the stars; you, the first and the last, the living, the dead, the re-born; you, who gather up in your superabundant oneness every delight, every taste, every energy, every phase of existence, to you my being cries out with a longing as vast as the universe: for you are indeed my Lord and my God." 'Mass Upon the Altar of the World'

4		"By virtue of the Creation, and still more, of the Incarnation, NOTHING here below is profane for those who know how to see."

5		"God whom we try to apprehend by the groping of our lives – that self-same God is as pervasive and perceptible as the atmosphere in which we are bathed. He encompasses us on all sides, like the world itself….God truly waits for us in things, unless indeed He advances to meet us."

6		"In the whole process which from first to last activates and directs the elements of the universe, everything forms a single whole. And we begin to see more distinctly the great sun of Christ the King, of Christ amictus mundo, of the universal Christ, rising over our interior world."

7		"This is what I have learnt from my contact with the earth – the diaphany of the divine at the heart of a glowing universe, the divine radiating from the depths of matter a-flame."

8		"All-embracing providence shows me at each moment, by the day's events, the next step to take and the next rung to climb."

9		"By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us."

10		"Throughout my life, by means of my life, the world has become almost completely luminous from within…Such has been my experience in contact with the earth – the diaphany of the Divine at the heart of the universe on fire….Christ; his heart; a fire: capable of penetrating everywhere and, gradually, spreading everywhere."

11		"I am not speaking metaphorically when I say that it is throughout the length and breadth and depth of the world in movement that man can attain the experience and vision of his God."

12		"May the time come when people, having been awakened to a sense of the close bond linking all the movements of this owrld in the single, all-embracing work of the Incarnation, shall be unable to give themselves to any one of their tasks without illuminating it with the clear vision that their work – however elementary it may be – is received and put to good use by a Centre of the universe."

13		"Every genesis presupposes inter-connections, mutual or reciprocal dependence, with no breach. It implies in the being that is forming itself a kinship between the composing elements; thus a static cosmos, fragmented in make-up, is unthinkable." Pierre Leroy, S.J., foreword

14		"Like a huge fire that is fed by what should normally extinguish it, or like a mighty torrent which is swelled by the very obstacles placed to stem it, so the tension engendered by the encounter between man and God dissolves, bears along and volatilises created things and makes them all, equally, serve the cause of union."

15		"We find ourselves at every moment situated at the exact point at which the whole bundle of inward and outward forces of the world converge providentially upon us, that is to say at the one point where the divine milieu can, at a given moment, be made real for us."

16		"Your essential duty and desire is to be united with God. But in order to be united, you must first of all Be – be yourself as completely as possible."

17		"Everything can be taken up again and recast in God, even one's faults."

18		"In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way."

19		"What is most divine in God is that, in an absolute sense, we are nothing apart from him."

20		"The enrichment and ferment of religious thought in our time has undoubtedly been caused by the revelation of the size and the unity of the world all around us and within us. All around us the physical sciences are endlessly extending the abysses of time and space, and cleaselessly discerning new relationships between the elements of the universe. Within us a whole world of affinities and interrelated sympathies, as old as the human soul, is being awakened by the stimulus of these great discoveries, and what has hitherto been dreamed rather than experienced is at last taking shape and consistency. Scholarly and discriminating among serious thinkers, simple or didactic among the half-educated, the aspirations towards a vaster and more organic One, and the premonitions of unknown forces and their application in new fields, are the same, and are emerging simultaneously on all sides. It is almost a commonplace today to find people who, quote naturally and unaffectedly, live in the explicit consciousness of being an atom or a cititzen of the universe."

21		"Matter and spirit, as we know them in our universe, are not two separate substances, set side by side and differing in nature. They are two distinct aspects of one single cosmic stuff and there is between them no conflict to baffle our intelligence." Pierre Leroy, S.J., foreword

22		"All created things, every one of them, cannot be looked at, in their nature and action, without the same reality being found in their innermost being – like sunlight in the fragments of a broken mirror – one beneath its multiplicity."

23		"In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected. And however autonomous our soul, it in indebted to an inheritance worked upon from all sides – before ever it came into being – by the totality of the energies of the earth."

24		"However vast the divine milieu may be, it is in reality a centre. It therefore has the properties of a centre, and above all the absolute and final power to unite (and consequently to complete) all beings within its breast."

25		"It is perfectly right to exalt the role of a good intention as the necessary start and foundation of all else; - it is the golden key which unlocks our inward personal world to God's presence."