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		"Total healthiness comes from wholeness, which is holiness. This resonance enables a consonance to sound from microcosm through mesocosm to macrocosm, and is the root and secret to finding unity and the unified experience." Keith Critchlow, 'What Is Sacred in Architecture?"

2		"All things that are ever said to be consist of a one and a many." Plato, 'Philebus'

3		"The universe is of one piece – it is a 'one only': one humanity, one nature, one universe, one God."

4		"the whole world is the outward form of universal reason." Rumi, 'The Masnavi'

5		"As Plato teaches in the 'Timaeus', the universe is one single, visible living being." Christopher Bamford, introduction

6		"Mind has the possibility of seeing itself reflected in the forms and symbols to which it gives birth. Its words and numbers, forms and images, are metaphors describing itself, and so are our most powerful tools for penetrating into its actions and modes." Robert Lawlor, 'Ancient Temple Architecture'

7		"The human world, particularly as understood in the inspiring philosophy and ideals of a sacred tradition, is essentially about 'lifting up'. As all life draws up to the light, so is the human psyche attracted to the elevating principles which act as constant regenerators to the forms and beings of our world." Keith Critchlow, 'What Is Sacred in Architecture?"

8		"Every power in nature and in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole means and condition of its manifestation: and all opposition is a tendency to reunion." Samuel Taylor Coleridge

9		"Nothing is a thing by itself. It takes its meaning and indeed its existence only in interaction with something else." Robert Lawlor, 'Ancient Temple Architecture'

10		"We only establish knowledge about something through its relation to something else. Language, images, symbols, formulae, measurement, observation are all products of analogos, for the human mind has the tendency to register, understand, and recall events in terms of the similarities to, and differences from, other events. The mind is, from this point of view, an instrument for making analogical models; that is to say it is an instrument whereby one thing may see itself reflected in another – which is, in a certain sense, a way to describe love." Robert Lawlor, 'Ancient Temple Architecture'

11		"It is now, all at once, one, continuous….Nor is it divisible more here and less there….but it is full of what is." Heraclitus, Fragment 8

12		"Cosmos is much more than just the universe. It includes the idea of beauty, order or goodness, and structural perfection which we might call truth. All of these are held together by the prior principle of unity, which, manifesting as Cosmos – one mass of Life and Consciousness as the 'Corpus Hermeticum' will say – becomes a teaching of the harmony, sympathy and kinship of all things." Christopher Bamford, Introduction

13		"The cosmos is spiritually based and our human species shares in the divine." Arthur G. Zajonc, contemporary physicist, 'The Two Lights'

14		"Dante said, 'The elements of all things that Nature begins, whatever be their mode, observe an inner order. It is this Form that makes the Universe resemble God.'" Robert Lawlor, 'Pythagorean Number as Form, Color, and Light'

15		"The mind is drawn quite naturally to the ideal of Truth; the heart or our values, is quite naturally drawn to the ideal of Beauty; the guts or will is quite naturally drawn to the ideal of the Good." Keith Critchlow, 'Twelve Criteria for Sacred Architecture'

16		"If one wants to know of the most elevating, inspired and 'energetic' revelations that have been expressed through the human vehicle, it is to the Scriptures of the world that one has to turn. They have moved millions of people through thousands of years and have left legacies of elevative energy in the form of the great sages, sagas, music, painting, objects and architecture, and not less the profoundly healthy agricultural and medical systems based on co-operation." Keith Critchlow, 'What Is Sacred in Architecture?"

17		"Light is consciousness imaging itself. So each particular is a tiny holographic image of self-perception within a larger, anthropocosmic formation of self-perception. Perception is the unceasing activity of existence. The universe is created in perception: it evolves through the evolution of perception; and its goal lies in the perfection of self-perception." Robert Lawlor, 'Pythagorean Number as Form, Color, and Light'

18		"Creating and using symbols…allows human individuals and populations to communicate over vast spans of time and space….giving the human mind the opportunity to flow backwards and forward in time through the retention or projection of symbols contained within its own memory and imagination." Robert Lawlor, 'Ancient Temple Architecture'

19		"Every event is connected to every other event." Robert Lawlor, 'Ancient Temple Architecture'

20		"The visible form is a nucleus in a spectral nest of related fields which resonate and conduct the information which controls the self-organization and development of the form. Each formation or morphic unit results from the organizational capacity of the morphic field, and each form reciprocally contributes to the continuation (nourishment) of that field." Robert Lawlor, 'Pythagorean Number as Form, Color, and Light'

21		"The followers of Pythagoras and Empedocles, and most of the Italian philosophers, say that there is a certain community uniting us not only with each other and with the gods, but even with creation. There is in fact one breath pervading the whole cosmos like a soul and uniting us with them." Sextus Empiricus, 'Advanced Mathematics'

22		"The [Greek] Stoics used the Heraclitean concept of an all-pervasive universal principle, which they considered to be divine." Keith Critchlow, 'The Platonic Tradition'

23		"From the perspective of wholeness all space is sacred: it is up to each of us whether or not this is realized. This is the real meaning of RESPONSE-ability." Keith Critchlow, 'Twelve Criteria for Sacred Architecture'

24		"Both as a principle of unity and a model of the cosmos, the sphere represents the ultimate undivided, undifferentiated whole." Keith Chritchlow, 'Twelve Criteria for Sacred Architecture'

25		"In reality everything is a simultaneity of interconnected relationships." Robert Lawlor, 'Ancient Temple Architecture'