Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by James Hillman, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring James Hillman quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 133 James Hillman quotes for you to read and share.

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All we can do when we think of kids today is think of more hours of school, earlier age at the computer, and curfews. Who would want to grow up in that world? -- James Hillman
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The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control? -- James Hillman
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Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention. -- James Hillman
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My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them. -- James Hillman
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Because every exchange is always a relationship, to get the most while giving the least is unjust, unethical, antisocial, abusive, perhaps 'evil.' Yet predatory commerce ("the free market" as it is euphemistically called) operates regularly on the principle of 'get the most and pay the least. -- James Hillman
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I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result. -- James Hillman
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Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life. -- James Hillman
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Too often in the west we fail to realize that even in eastern disciplines the spiritual life is not meant as an escape from the worldly life. There is karma to be fulfilled on earth, within the dharma of necessity. -- James Hillman
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We're an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security. -- James Hillman
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Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars. -- James Hillman
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Anytime you're gonna grow, you're gonna lose something. You're losing what you're hanging onto to keep safe. You're losing habits that you're comfortable with, you're losing familiarity. -- James Hillman
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The older people that one admires seem to be fearless. They go right out into the world. It's astounding. Maybe they can't see or they can't hear, but they walk out into the street and take life as it comes. They're models of courage, in a strange way. -- James Hillman
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Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough. -- James Hillman
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Fear is a huge thing for older people. -- James Hillman
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Yes, we worship the idea of the "self-made man" - otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea. -- James Hillman
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As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity. -- James Hillman
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I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can't go back over that again. I can't put that into a two-word answer. I can't. Wherever I go, people say, "Can I ask you a quick question?" It's always, "a quick question." Well, my answers are slow. -- James Hillman
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It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all. -- James Hillman
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My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently. -- James Hillman
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It's very important for men to look downward, to the next generation. -- James Hillman
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Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining. -- James Hillman
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Art, for example, becomes "art therapy." When patients make music, it becomes "music therapy." When the arts are used for "therapy" in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position. -- James Hillman
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To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair. -- James Hillman
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We need to have an educational system that's able to embrace all sorts of minds, and where a student doesn't have to fit into a certain mold of learning. -- James Hillman
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How can we know ourselves by ourselves? ... Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount. -- James Hillman
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Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable. -- James Hillman
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What door is opened into soul through our wounds. -- James Hillman
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To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere. -- James Hillman
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Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. -- James Hillman
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The comic spirit masquerades in all things we say and do. We are each a clown and do not need to put on a white face. -- James Hillman
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Aptitude can show calling, but it isn't the only indicator. Ineptitude or dysfunction may reveal calling more than talent, curiously enough. -- James Hillman
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It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view. -- James Hillman
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Words are like pillows: if put correctly they ease pain. -- James Hillman
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The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one. -- James Hillman
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I'm in favor of destruction, aggression, hating things. Not bearing things anymore. We think the breakdown comes because our life is in bad shape. But maybe the ideas cause the disorder. Something tries to break through and causes the disorder. -- James Hillman
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We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority. -- James Hillman
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Loss means losing what was we want to change but we don't want to lose. Without time for loss, we don't have time for soul. -- James Hillman
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So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job. -- James Hillman
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Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods. -- James Hillman
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We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive. -- James Hillman
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You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy. -- James Hillman
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The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world. -- James Hillman
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The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul. -- James Hillman
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The elder who is eliminating what time has done to the face, what life has done to the face, is making a statement for others to see: This is the way to be a good old person - it is to defeat this body that is doing things to you. Because you haven't changed. Your body's changing. -- James Hillman
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In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient. -- James Hillman
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We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I'm an accident - a result - and therefore a victim. -- James Hillman
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We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up? -- James Hillman
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We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child's beauty and singling that child out. That's how the mentor system works - you're caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together. -- James Hillman
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Our dreams recover what the world forgets. -- James Hillman
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By seeing differently, we do differently -- James Hillman
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Pathology is not a problem to be solved, but the soul's way of working on itself. -- James Hillman
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Sometimes we act in order not to see. -- James Hillman
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Anything you attend to carefully can bring blessing ... -- James Hillman
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Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering. -- James Hillman
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The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it's also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don't see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that's been there all along. -- James Hillman
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You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss. -- James Hillman
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I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not. -- James Hillman
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Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet. -- James Hillman
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Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be. -- James Hillman
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Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in. -- James Hillman
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Psychology ideally means giving soul to language and finding language for soul. -- James Hillman
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Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here. -- James Hillman
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It's important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from me? That may very well reveal what you are here for. -- James Hillman
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I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. -- James Hillman
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Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us ... -- James Hillman
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Remember that in the early days of the feminist movement, they refused to have a leader; different women would just stand up and speak. The early feminists were very careful to not put what was spontaneously arising back in the old bottle. -- James Hillman
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Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul. -- James Hillman
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We vote for Perot. We think he's a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It's unbelievable, yet it's part of that worship of individuality. -- James Hillman
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The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm's length because they are so full of love -- James Hillman
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When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition. -- James Hillman
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Without time for loss you don't have time for soul. -- James Hillman
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The circumstances, including my body and my parents, whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice and I do not understand this because I have forgotten. -- James Hillman
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Each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver's seat. -- James Hillman
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Perhaps Eurydice wants to remain marginal, a shade insubstantial ... the mute waste in a limbo without light and without depth are a style of anima fascinations in which the absence of significance is the significance. -- James Hillman
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L.P. So your work must fight religion?
J.H. No, not at all! It fights the unconsciousness, the blindness, that all myth creates about itself. You never can see the actual myth you are in or only through a glass darkly. -- James Hillman
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I don't have answers. I have questions. -- James Hillman
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Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story? -- James Hillman
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Many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. -- James Hillman
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If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination. -- James Hillman
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Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy. -- James Hillman
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We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. -- James Hillman
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Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign. I confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors. There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way ... Tradition would say I was a 'child of Mars.' -- James Hillman
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I know my own deficiencies, one of which is that I had lived away from America for such a long time. It's called expatriate. -- James Hillman
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The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer? -- James Hillman
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The culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world? -- James Hillman
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Well, if I'm only a result of past causes, then I'm a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here. -- James Hillman
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If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now. -- James Hillman
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I think there is such a thing as a bad seed that comes to flower in certain people. The danger with that theory is that we begin to look for those "troublemakers" early on and try to weed them out. That's very dangerous, because it could work against kids who are just routine troublemakers. -- James Hillman
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You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things. -- James Hillman
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We dull our lives by the way we conceive them. -- James Hillman
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Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way - whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that. -- James Hillman
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You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed. -- James Hillman
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People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology. -- James Hillman
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I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness. -- James Hillman
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The soul of our civilization depends upon the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture calls for a culture of the imagination. -- James Hillman
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Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area. -- James Hillman
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The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way. -- James Hillman
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How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don't think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it's a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation - like Charles Manson. -- James Hillman
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Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible. -- James Hillman
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To be sane, we must recognise our beliefs as fictions. -- James Hillman
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Calling can refer not only to ways of doing - meaning work - but also to ways of being. -- James Hillman
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Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. -- James Hillman
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By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God -- James Hillman
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Miracle it is to find the right words, words that carry soul accurately, -- James Hillman
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Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path ... this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am. -- James Hillman
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Teachers today can't take to a child. -- James Hillman
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I'm cautious about a lot of words. -- James Hillman
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Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there's usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul. -- James Hillman
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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose. -- James Hillman
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The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder. -- James Hillman
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From my perspective as a depth psychologist, I see that those who have a connection with story are in better shape and have better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced. -- James Hillman
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To the question, "Why am I old?" the usual answer is, "Because I am becoming dead." But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death. -- James Hillman
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Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul. -- James Hillman
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We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office. -- James Hillman
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I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche ... -- James Hillman
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I am not caused by my history-my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image. -- James Hillman
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Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind. -- James Hillman
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In the cosmology that's behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything. -- James Hillman
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What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child's destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child. -- James Hillman
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What ages is not merely your functions and organs, but the whole of your nature, that particular person you have come to be and already were years ago. -- James Hillman
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Whether we like it or not, men have more of the offices, more of the higher jobs, more of the seats in Congress. Men need to re-examine what their power is. We need to understand how to use it. -- James Hillman
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Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society. -- James Hillman
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We forget that the soul has its own ancestors. -- James Hillman
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I can't read all the books I want to read, I can't watch all the phenomena that interest me in the world. The work calls me, and sometimes I wonder whether this is an obsession and I should drop it, or it's a necessity I'm obliged to fulfill. -- James Hillman
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Food is so fundamental, more so than sexuality, aggression, or learning, that it is astounding to realize the neglect of food and eating in depth psychology. -- James Hillman
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It's very hard to know what wisdom is. -- James Hillman
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You are born with a character; it is given, a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth ... Each person enters the world called. -- James Hillman
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I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics. -- James Hillman
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Futurism is another American myth: whether Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan or Obama, American presidents all come into office with a new program, and the conviction that the country is going to be better than ever. -- James Hillman
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It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it. -- James Hillman
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We carve out risk-free lives where nothing happens. -- James Hillman
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I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person. -- James Hillman
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An individual's harmony with his or her 'own deep self' requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world. -- James Hillman