James Hillman Quotes
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It's very important for men to look downward, to the next generation.
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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?
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Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.
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It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.
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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.
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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.
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The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
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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.
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I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.
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We carve out risk-free lives where nothing happens.
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We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
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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.
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Fear is a huge thing for older people.
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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?
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I don't have answers. I have questions.
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We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.
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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.