“This power…reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge , book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV.
Context: This power... reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge 220

English poet, literary critic and philosopher 1772–1834

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“Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in him impersonal emotion.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Vague Thoughts On Art (1911)
Context: Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in him impersonal emotion. And the greatest Art is that which excites the greatest impersonal emotion in an hypothecated perfect human being.

“Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full…”

Théophile de Donder (1872–1957) Belgian physicist

as quoted by Ilya Prigogine in his Autobiography http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1977/prigogine-autobio.html given at the occasion of Prigogine's 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“The terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ must be understood as representing no more primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"A Personal Letter, With a Request for a Reply", January 1937

“[One of the company… said: …is not this the direct contrary of what we admitted before—that out of the greater came the less and out of the less the greater, and that opposites are simply generated from opposites; whereas now this seems to be utterly denied. ] …then we were speaking of opposites in the concrete, and now of the essential opposite which, as is affirmed, neither in us nor in nature can ever be at variance with itself… these essetial opposites will never, as we maintain, admit of generation into or out of one another.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

“He who thinks he can have flesh and bones without being subject to any external influence, or any accidents of matter, unconsciously wishes to reconcile two opposites, viz., to be at the same time subject and not subject to change. If man were never subject to change there could be no generation; there would be one single being, but no individuals forming a species.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Compare Galileo, "...for my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly. If, not being subject to any changes... I should deem it a useless lump in the universe, devoid of activity and, in a word, superfluous and essentially non-existent." Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.12