Great Throughts Treasury

"Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us." -

"The unity of God, the freedom of man, and the creation of the world. Upon these three pillars, and upon them alone, rests and must rest every revealed religion." - S. L. Steinheim, Solomon Ludwig (Levy) Steinheim

"All creatures seek after unity; all multiplicity struggles toward it - the universal aim of all life is always this unity. All that flows outward is a flow backward into its source - God." - Johannes Tauler

"God’s purpose in history is to save individuals, not as individuals, but as participants in his kingdom, in the unity of all beings under God." -

"The ecumenical movement... is able to heal divisions which have become historically obsolete, to replace confessional fanaticism by inter-confessional cooperation, to conquer denominational provincialism, and to produce a new vision of the unity of all churches in their foundation." -

"Who sees variety and not the unity wanders on from death to death." - Katha Upanishad

"Belief in the intrinsic unity of knowledge – the reality of the labyrinth – rides ultimately on the hypothesis that every mental process has a physical grounding and is consistent with the natural sciences." -

"If there cannot be immediate unity of faith, there must be unity of love, expressing itself in common effort in social, economic and political relations." - John Joseph Wright

"The unity in productive (creative) work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love." -

"Our freedom depends on our willingness to see Perfection. The imperfection that we have been taught to see has led only to suffering... Perfection is not a standard to be achieved, but a truth to be acknowledged. It is not the difference between us and God, but the hallmark of our unity with Him. And the honoring of Perfection is not a sin of vanity, but the humble acceptance of our identity as offspring of the Eternal." - Alan Cohen

"Our freedom depends on our willingness to see Perfection. The imperfection that we have been taught to see has led only to suffering... Perfection is not a standard to be achieved, but a truth to be acknowledged. It is not the difference between us and God, but the hallmark of our unity with Him. And the honoring of Perfection is not a sin of vanity, but the humble acceptance of our identity as offspring of the Eternal." -

"Our freedom depends on our willingness to see Perfection. The imperfection that we have been taught to see has led only to suffering... Perfection is not a standard to be achieved, but a truth to be acknowledged. It is not the difference between us and God, but the hallmark of our unity with Him. And the honoring of Perfection is not a sin of vanity, but the humble acceptance of our identity as offspring of the Eternal." -

"Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which makes for separateness." -

"Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which makes for separateness." -

"Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which makes for separateness." -

"Opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement. In their unity, they inhibit or contrast. God and the World stand to each other in this opposed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The World is the multiplicity of finites, actualities, seeking a perfected unity. Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the ultimately metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other." - Alfred North Whitehead

"There is a unity of the body with the environment, as well as a unity of the body and soul into one person." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Enthusiasm imparts itself magnetically and fuses all into one happy and harmonious unity of feeling and sentiment." - Amos Bronson Alcott

"The will is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind… it is the will which… gives unity to consciousness and holds together all its ideas and thoughts, accompanying them like a continuous harmony." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. If love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service." - Arthur W Osborn

"Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. IF love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service." - Arthur W Osborn

"Lines converging from the base of a pyramid start from infinite points of diversity. The nearer the apex the closer they come to one another until at the summit they reach the point of unity. So it is that religions at the base exhibit irreconcilable differences and conflicts. But as they approach sight of the spiritual light of their origin, they, like converging lines within a pyramid, draw close to one another until the supernal vision at the apex submerges all differences into unity." - Arthur W Osborn

"Minds have forms because, although they are changing streams of consciousness, they exhibit the paradox of unity in diversity which is the characteristic of all wholes. Forms are aspects of consciousness and precede tangible and so-called substantial expression. The universe as a totality, comprising forms and their integration into wholes in infinite diversity, is an expression of Life universal in graded series on various levels. Every particular form-expression “creates” its own time-space. Substance and tangibility have no reality apart from sensory apprehension." - Arthur W Osborn

"What cosmic reality is it that love demonstrates? The essential quality of every act of love is to bring the apparently discrete into a relationship of unity" - Arthur W Osborn

"Everything above and below is one unity." -

"“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Why? Because every human being has a root in the Unity, and to reject the minutest particle of the Unity is to reject it all." - Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer

"The multitude which is not brought to act as unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny." - Blaise Pascal

"Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion. Unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny." - Blaise Pascal

"The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization. And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth." -

"Cultivate unity. You do your hearing, not with your ears, but with your mind; not with your mind, but with your very soul. But let the hearing stop with the ears. Let the working of the mind stop with itself. Then the soul will be a negative existence, passively responsive to externals. In such a negative existence, only Tao can abide. And the negative state is the fasting of the heart." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"Man is here to experience the unity of his own consciousness, to rise from suffering to perfection, and in the triumph of enlightenment to reclaim the earth as a heaven designed from him. Beneath the mask of suffering, the meaning of life is limitless freedom and the conquest of death." - Deepak Chopra

"Truth is perfect and complete in itself. It is not something newly discovered; it has always existed. Truth is not far away. It is nearer than near. There is no need to attain it, since not one of your steps leads away from it. Don't follow the advice of others; rather, learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become one, and you will realize the unity of all things." -

"We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions - bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR

"Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness only as the reunification of my independence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. Love, however, is feeling, that is, ethical life in the form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent persona and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than this point of self-consciousness which is negated and which nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the propounding and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"The relation of love between husband and wife is in itself not objective, because even if their feeling is their substantial unity, still this unity has no objectivity. Such objectivity parents first acquire in their children, in whom they can see objectified the entirety of their union." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"The Absolute is Mind (Spirit) - this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burden was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science; and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world... It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"The truth of Being and Nothing is accordingly the unity of the two: and this unity is Becoming." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"In reality, every self is far from being a unity; it is a constellation of Selves, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. Man is an onion made up of a hundred layers, a texture made up of many threads." -

"All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought." - Immanuel Kant

"In view of the complete systematic unity of reason, there can only be one ultimate end of all the operations of the mind. To this all other aims are subordinate, and nothing more than means for its attainment. This ultimate end is the destination of man, and the philosophy which relates to it is termed moral philosophy." - Immanuel Kant

"The permanent in phenomena must be regarded as the substratum of all determination of time, and consequently also as the condition of the possibility of all synthetical unity of perceptions, that in time can only be regarded as a mode in the existence of that which abides unchangeably. Therefore, in all phenomena, the permanent is the object in itself." - Immanuel Kant

"To atone is to be at one with God, to sink self into the not-self, to achieve a mystic unity with the source of being, wiping out all error and finding peace in self-submergence." - Isaac Goldberg

"What science calls unity and uniformity of nature, truth calls the fidelity of God." - James Martineau

"The fact that the eye constantly thrusts outwards distracts us from self-knowledge and the way inwards. It dissipates attention... The eye says I. We sense when someone is looking at us. Their gaze insists: Pay attention to me! Almost everyone is also aware of that when the observer is standing behind us. We notice after a while. Someone is there. Who is it? Who would not, however, know if someone were listening to us if he or she did not say so. The listener does not put the emphasis on himself or event the other person. He does not insist on a separation between subject and object. The ear establishes a 'more correct' relationship between ourselves and others. It implies unity rather than division. Eye and ear need one another. Ear and eye are not alternatives." - Joachim-Ernst Berendt

"The unity of freedom has never relied on the uniformity of opinion." -

"On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony." - John Muir

"As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite - variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite - energy. It is not the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not." - John Ruskin

"The passions of mankind are partly protective, partly beneficent, like the chaff and grain of the corn, but none without their use, none without nobleness when seen in balanced unity with the rest of the spirit which they are charged to defend." - John Ruskin

"This unity of dramatic dynamism between two elements, the I and the world - is life." - José Ortega y Gasset

"Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis." - Joseph Campbell