Duality Quotes (120) Spiritual Sayings
Summary: Duality is described as a twofold division in several spiritual, religious, and philosophical doctrines
Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict.
~ Rabindranath Tagore
Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.
~ Hans Urs von Balthasar
I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
The beginning, middle, and end of the birth, growth, and perfection of whatever we behold is from contraries, by contraries, and to contraries; and whatever contrariety is, there is action and reaction, there is motion, diversity, multitude, and order, there are degrees, succession and vicissitude.
~ Giordano Bruno
As long as the mind and ego control the direction of creating, there will always be problems in the outer world, for the ego thinks only of itself and lives in duality. But when the heart is in control, everything comes back to balance, for the heart feels and knows only the oneness of life.
~ Drunvalo Melchizedek
In order to eat, you have to be hungry. In order to learn, you have to be ignorant. Ignorance is a condition of learning. Pain is a condition of health. Passion is a condition of thought. Death is a condition of life.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
So love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
~ Eckhart Tolle
The world has only as much power over you as you give it. Rebel. Go beyond duality.
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.
~ Alan Watts
Love is the recognition of oneness in the world of duality.
~ Eckhart Tolle
Past and Future are a duality of which Present is the reality. The now-moment alone is eternal and real.
~ Wei Wu Wei
There is both joy and suffering on planet Earth because this beautiful world is a world of duality - a world of opposites. There is an opposite side to everything.
~ Rhonda Byrne
Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.
~ Karl Lagerfeld
My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless ; 'Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved. I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one; One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.
~ Rumi
Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.
~ Stephen Hawking
Through intense deep meditation you reach a state that is beyond thought, beyond change, beyond imagination, beyond differences and duality. Once you can stay in that state for a while and come out of it without losing any of it, then the inner divine love will begin to pour through you. You will not see people as different, separate individuals. You will see your own Self in everyone around you. Then the flow of love from within you will be constant and unbroken.
~ Swami Muktananda
The binding of reason and intuition is the fundamental crisis of the era we call humanity. Transcedence of duality is the key.
~ Phil Collins
Who is it that loves and who that suffers? He alone stages a play with Himself; who exists save Him? The individual suffers because he perceives duality. It is duality which causes all sorrow and grief. Find the One everywhere and in everything and there will be an end to pain and suffering.
~ Anandamayi Ma
Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He." You cannot say God is a "She." You cannot say God is an "It." (18)
~ Joseph Campbell
To accept duality is to earn identity.
~ Joss Whedon
Normally we empower our demons by believing they are real and strong in themselves and have the power to destroy us. As we fight against them, they get stronger. But when we acknowledge them by discovering what they really need, and nurture them, our demons release their hold, and we find that they actually do not have power over us. By nurturing the shadow elements of our being with infinite generosity, we can access the state of luminous awareness and undermine ego. By feeding the demons, we resolve conflict and duality, finding our way to unity.
~ Tsultrim Allione
Duality is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts
~ Namkhai Norbu
The Witness is a huge step forward, and it is a necessary and important step in meditation, but it is not ultimate. When the Witness or the soul is finally undone, then the Witness dissolves into everything that is witnessed. The subject/object duality collapses and there is only pure nondual awareness, which is very simple, very obvious.
~ Ken Wilber
The duality of St Petersburg and Leningrad remains. They are not even on speaking terms.
~ Joseph Wechsberg
The binding of reason and intuition is the fundamental crisis of the era we call humanity. Transcedence of duality is the key.
~ Phil Collins
The sense of duality, which is a barrier to true love, must prevail so long as the apperception of Truth has not occurred. Once individuality is surrendered, there is only total Love.
~ Ramesh S Balsekar
Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.
~ Emmet Gowin
I think that light and shadow have exactly the same duality that exists between life and death.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo
A character on screen that's the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy,' they're never interesting. There's got to be an internal struggle, the duality is important to find.
~ Bill Skarsgard
The physical universe was created when Oneness became duality, and we can see this duality, this yin and yang, everywhere in the universe, in every atom, every action, and in every function of the human body. Yin and yang are manifest everywhere, except at the very center of being, the perfect point of balance, at that infinite moment where the future becomes the past.
~ Robert Tisserand
The meditator develops new depths of insight through direct communication with the reality of the phenomenal world... He or she is able to see not only the absence of complexity, the absence of duality, but the stoneness of stone and the waterness of water. One sees things precisely as they are, not merely in the physical sense, but with awareness of their spiritual significance.
~ Chogyam Trungpa
Egotism is such a terrible disease, in the love of duality, they do their deeds.
~ Guru Gobind Singh
When one is working out a problem ... life becomes duality. One's ego transacts the ordinary routine of things, as if the mind had an upper and lower story and the regular performance of the day's duties moved and motivated on the upper floor, while down below the all-absorbing problem toils silently, forcefully, toward its solution.
~ Alice Foote MacDougall
To awaken to the absolute view is profound and transformative, but to awaken from all fixed points of view is the birth of true non-duality. If emptiness cannot dance, it is not true emptiness. If moonlight does not flood the empty night sky and reflect in every drop of water, on every blade of grass, then you are only looking at your own empty dream.
~ Adyashanti
In presence, there is no right or wrong, because there is no duality. There is no judgment.
~ Leonard Jacobson
Life is light and consciousness. Beyond this world and other worlds, beyond time and space and dimension, beyond what we call duality, is God
~ Frederick Lenz
Going from Giraud to Moebius, I twisted the strip; changed dimensions. I was the same and yet someone else. Moebius is the result of my duality.
~ Jean Giraud
Mind cannot think without duality. Duality is the way of thinking. In silence, all dualities disappear.
~ Rajneesh
Everything I do is a reflection of the duality within me. Musically, I really love things that are very synthetic and unnatural. And I also like the organic and human... the intrinsic, I guess.
~ Zola Jesus
There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is - in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel.
~ Siddhartha Mukherjee
Rise above the dualities, the opposites. See this whole world as the bubbles on the surface of water. See people as bubbles on the surface of the Brahman, of the Infinity...Water bubbles up, rises up. Like that, everybody is rising and having their own games and plays and dissolving back into the Infinite.
~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
In the universe, there is darkness and light. We call this duality. When you seek knowledge and power, there are forces and people that will oppose you.
~ Frederick Lenz
...the fall [of your soul] from perfection into duality...was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil...This is the Biblical version of a myth known to many lands ...
~ Joseph Campbell
I am at one with my duality.
~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
We cut up time and space and mind and place and being and non-being. We create a world of ideas. This is duality, pairs of apparent opposites.
~ Frederick Lenz
Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.
~ Wislawa Szymborska
In my work theres always been a duality between sticking to reality and trying to stage things.
~ Carl De Keyzer
Why chase after thoughts, which are superficial ripples of present awareness? Rather look directly into the naked, empty nature of thoughts; then there is no duality, no observer, and nothing observed. Simply rest in this transparent, nondual present awareness. Make yourself at home in the natural state of pure presence, just being, not doing anything in particular.
~ Jamgon Kongtrul
Great repressions create dualities.
~ Anais Nin
There is more of turn than of truth in a saying of Seneca, "That drunkenness does not produce but discover faults." Common experience teaches the contrary. Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses dualities into the mind which she is a stranger to in her sober moments.
~ Joseph Addison
Zen takes the opposite tack; it holds that true reality is the fundamental unity of mind and matter, inner spirit and external world. When life is viewed in such terms, there can be no success or failure, happiness or unhappiness; life is a whole, and you are simply part of it. There are no dualities, hence there is nothing to worry about. The result is perfect tranquility.
~ Tom Hoover
Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes.
~ Francis Bacon
The main ingredient of the first quantum revolution, wave-particle duality, has led to inventions such as the transistor and the laser that are at the root of the information society.
~ Alain Aspect
Nothing aids which may not also injure us.
Fire serves us well, but he who plots to burn
His neighbor's roof arms his hands with fire.
~ Ovid
Duality is always secretly unity.
~ Alan Watts
Choice is born out of opposites, and the duality of the second chakra is forever challenging us to make choices in a world of opposing sides, of positive and negative energy patterns. Every choice we make contributes a subtle current of our energy to our universe, which is responsive to the influence of human consciousness.
~ Caroline Myss
Wave particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions of our world. But what is critical to note here is that, however ambiguous our images, the universe itself remains whole and is manifestly not fracturing into schizophrenic shards. It is this tantalizing wholeness and the thing itself that drives physicists onward like an eternally beckoning light that seems so teasingly near. It is always out of reach.
~ Margaret Wertheim
When you sit in the full lotus position, your left foot is on your right thigh and your right foot is on your left thigh. When we cross our legs like this, even though we have a right leg and a left leg, they become one. The position expresses the oneness of duality: not two and not one. This is the most important teaching: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one.
~ Shunryu Suzuki
The image of God, then, involves gender identity and complementarity. God created gender in duality as male and female.
~ Andrew Comiskey
In the case of complex personalities the matter stands thus: one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has not only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension.
~ Otto Weininger
I've been on a quest for spiritual answers for a long time. The things I've learned about interconnectedness and non-duality and the feeling of tapping into your soul that goes beyond the edge of your skin is important to me. Once I learned that, I'm far less often trapped in my own little man problems. Me against the universe problems.
~ Jim Carrey
Franco-Albertans have created a valuable legacy throughout the province. Our Government is pleased to support these projects, which showcase the thriving Francophone community in Calgary. We will continue to support our official languages and protect, celebrate, and strengthen Canada's linguistic duality.
~ Shelly Glover
I am not a big fan of positive thinking. The term suggests that there is something negative that you have to counteract by being positive. That is an artificial duality.
~ Srikumar Rao
Suetonius, in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within - for we are both, and to ignore this duality is to invite disaster.
~ Suetonius
Fear is only in duality. Fear is Mind. When you are your Self, there is no fear.
~ Sivananda
I have put duality away. I have seen the two worlds are one.
~ Rumi
Only alone can you go into eternity. Only alone can you feel the transcendental light. It is not a shared experience because if it is shared, you are down in duality.
~ Frederick Lenz
Duality is a part of reality, and there is definitely winning and losing. If you don't think so talk to someone who has beaten cancer, talk to somebody who hasn't.
~ Frederick Lenz
People use ideas of non-duality as an escape from reality. It is very easy to say there is no winning and losing and justify the fact that you didn't do a very good job.
~ Frederick Lenz
My whole life was duality: Here's my life at home, here's my life on the road.
~ James Hetfield
The Buddha taught some people the teachings of duality that help them avoid sin and acquire spiritual merit. To others he taught non-duality, that some find profoundly frightening.
~ Akkineni Nagarjuna
Mind is a duality; it is always split. There is no single point on which the mind agrees in totality. Half of the mind will agree and half of the mind will disagree, and whatever you choose, you are choosing only the half. The remaining half is going to take revenge. The unchosen part, the left over, will wait for its chance to show you that whatever you have chosen is wrong. But it does not matter which part you choose. Choice itself is wrong.
~ Rajneesh
Love is the reflection of God's unity in the world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation.
~ Meher Baba
Only no-mind can be without any duality, because it is empty. The no-mind is choicelessness. The no-mind is pure awareness. It is just the empty sky.
~ Rajneesh
Once you know it, you move as a nonbeing. Nobody can make you angry, nobody can make you happy, unhappy, miserable. No! In that emptiness all dualities dissolve: happy, unhappy, miserable, blissful - all dissolve. This is buddhahood. This is what happened under the bodhi tree to Gautam Siddhartha. He reached emptiness. Then everything is silent. You have gone beyond opposites. A master is to help you to go to your inner emptiness, the inner silence, the inner temple.
~ Rajneesh
All duality is a mind creation, all duality is created by the clinging and attached mind. When there is no attachment there is no duality.
~ Rajneesh
Sinners live in a sort of hell, and saints imagine themselves in a sort of heaven. And the sage? - for him it is moksha, for him it is the absolute freedom. He is freed from all duality. The secret key, and the only key, is awareness.
~ Rajneesh
Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless.
~ James C. Collins
The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.
~ Roland Barthes
There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and All are terribly foolish, but because the process of thinking and researching, which finally yields truth, can only be accomplished by an individual person. In its singularity or duality, one human being seeks and finds – not the truth (Lessing) –, but some truth.
~ Hannah Arendt
Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divided all of you from us.
~ Maurice Samuel
Can you dissolve your ego? Can you abandon the idea of self and other? Can you relinquish the notions of male and female, short and long, life and death? Can you let go of all these dualities and embrace the Tao without skepticism or panic? If so, you can reach the heart of the Integral Oneness.
~ Laozi
Imagination builds the image of the self, and thought then functions within its shadows. From this self-concept grows the conflict between what is and what should be, the conflict in duality.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
There is nothing wrong with duality as long as it does not create conflict. Multiplicity and variety without strife is joy. In pure consciousness there is light. For warmth, contact is needed. Above the unity of being is the union of love. Love is the purpose of duality.
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered regressive or reactionary to reintroduce discussion of marriage and motherhood to primary education. We certainly do not want to return to the simplistic duality of home economics classes for girls and wood shop for boys.
~ Camille Paglia
Experience life in all possible ways -- good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don't be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.
~ Rajneesh
You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of.
~ J. D. Salinger
The direction of life is from duality to unity.
~ Deepak Chopra
The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)
~ Joseph Campbell
We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong.
~ Fernando Pessoa
There is no ideal in observation. When you have an ideal, you cease to observe, you are then merely approximating the present to the idea, and therefore there is duality, conflict, and all the rest of it. The mind has to be in the state when it can see, observe. The experience of the observation is really an astonishing state. In that there is no duality. The mind is simply - aware.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
It's weird, I was such a survivor and so wanted to be a part of life while I was trying to snuff out the life that was inside of me. I had this duality of trying to kill myself with drugs, then eating really good food and exercising and going swimming and trying to be a part of life. I was always going back and forth on some level.
~ Anthony Kiedis
My city. I pondered that phrase, wondered why Barrons felt that way. He never said “our world.” He always said “your world.” But he called Dublin his city. Merely because he’d been in it so long? Or had Barrons, like me, been beguiled by her tawdry grace, fallen for her charm and colorful dualities? I looked around “my” bookstore. That was what I called it. Did we call the things of our heart our own, whether they were or not?
~ Karen Marie Moning
Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.
~ Chogyam Trungpa
As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.
~ Chogyam Trungpa
That's just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you're flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
From "Wetness and Water" How does a part of the world leave the world? How can wetness leave water? Do not try to put out a fire by throwing on more fire. Do not wash a wound with blood. No matter how fast you run, your shadow more than keeps up. Sometimes it's in front. Only full, overhead sun diminishes your shadow. But that shadow has been serving you. What hurts you blesses you. Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest.
~ Rumi
That's the quality of the Spirit that you start feeling so joyous and the joy doesn't have the duality of happiness and unhappiness. It's singular.
~ Nirmala Srivastava
Spirit is the source of peace. It is the source of joy. It is not a duality of happiness and unhappiness, but singular joy.
~ Nirmala Srivastava
In God there is no duality. In that Presence "I" and "we" and "you" do not exist. "I" and "you" and "we" and "He" become one.... Since in the Unity there is no distinction, the Quest and the Way and the Seeker become one.
~ Mahmud Shabistari
(The real brahmin is the one who:) ... has crossed beyond duality ...knows no this shore, other shore, or both ...(is) settled in mind ... without inflowing thoughts ...is without attachment ...endures undisturbed criticism, ill-treatment and bonds, (and is) strong in patience ...(is) without anger, devout, upright, free from craving, disciplined and in his last body ...has experienced the end of his suffering here in this life, who has set down the burden, freed!
~ Gautama Buddha
There are two choices available in duality - one side or the other side. Everyting is formed from that.
~ Frederick Lenz
We can think of descriptions almost as computer languages, an operative description that only deals with very simple operations. Its code is sex - Male, female, dark, light, up down, in out - its the language of duality.
~ Frederick Lenz
The I Cing is a study in duality and what lies beyond duality.
~ Frederick Lenz
Peace is when the heart is no longer in duality, when the struggle within has been resolved.... A voice has been calling out: "What you are looking for is within you. Your truth is within you, your peace is within you..."
~ Prem Rawat
The mystical techniques for achieving immortality are revealed only to those who have dissolved all ties to the gross worldly realm of duality, conflict, and dogma. As long as your shallow worldly ambitions exist, the door will not open.
~ Laozi
Before you touch anybody you have to make sure that you are as pure as possible. If you don't purify yourself of all the inner duality, negativity can prevail through the flow of the psyche.
~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi
Transcendence means going beyond duality. Attachment means remaining within duality.
~ Rajneesh
When you are fully present, you transcend duality and open into Oneness. In Presence, there is power without opposition. There is love without hate, acceptance without judgment and allowing without control.
~ Leonard Jacobson
There are as many types of non-dualities as there are dualities.
~ David Loy
The feminine aspect has been crushed for millennia in most cultures. I believe the future lies in a balance of the male/female duality
~ Robert S. Jepson, Jr.
Then from the world all spirituality will be extinct, all moral perfection will be extinct, all sweet-souled sympathy for religion will be extinct, all ideality will be extinct; and in its place will reign the duality of lust and luxury as the male and female deities, with money as its priest, fraud, force, and competition its ceremonies, and the human soul its sacrifice. Such a thing can never be.
~ Swami Vivekananda
He who has realized the Self in the Heart has transcended the dualities and is never perplexed.
~ Ramana Maharshi
One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. To live in this faith is the road to non-duality, because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind.
~ Sengcan
The biggest thing this has in common with almost all of our records is the dualities are still there. We kind of stripped down the other things we were writing about, and that's what was left. A lot of good things have happened to us in the last couple of years both as a band and in our personal lives. But something as wonderful as having children also brings along these new fears and terrors and responsibilities.
~ Patterson Hood
When you live in surrender, something comes through you into the world of duality that is not of this world.
~ Eckhart Tolle
The cords of passion and desire weave a binding net around you. Worldly confrontation makes you stiff and inflexible. The trap of duality is tenacious. Bound, rigid, and trapped, you cannot experience liberation.
~ Laozi
Seeking out causes is a pastime of the mind. There is no duality of cause and effect. Everything is its own cause.
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
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