Famous Quotes & Sayings

James Hillman Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by James Hillman.

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Famous Quotes By 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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We dull our lives by the way we conceive them. — 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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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

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Many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. — 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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What door is opened into soul through our wounds. — James Hillman

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Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies - the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding. — 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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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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To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair. — 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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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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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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We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. — 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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I don't have answers. I have questions. — James Hillman

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The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel blest by everything. — 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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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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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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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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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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We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority. — 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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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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Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area. — James Hillman

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Without time for loss you don't have time for soul. — 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 willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking. — 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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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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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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The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism. — 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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It's very hard to know what wisdom is. — 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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The pathologized images have moved the soul in several ways: we are afraid; we feel vulnerable and in danger; our very physical sustance and sanity appear to be menaced; we want to prevent or rectify. Especially this last seizes us. We feel protective, impelled to correct, straighten, repair. For we have confused something sick with something wrong. [ ... ]
affliction reaches us partly through the guilt it brings. Guilt belongs to the experiences of deviation, the the sense of being off, failing, 'missing the mark'. [ ... ]
However the true missing of the mark is taking the guilt literally, where failings becomes faults to be set right. This places the guilt on the shoulders of the ego who 'should not' have failed. Then pathologizing reinforces the ego's style and guilt serves a secondary gain, increasing the ego's sense of importance: ego becomes superego, drivenly busy with repairing wrongs. A guilty ego is no less egocentric than a proud one. — 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 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 think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics. — James Hillman

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To be sane, we must recognise our beliefs as fictions. — 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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Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away. — 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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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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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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'Mediocre' tends to mean 'undistinguished', while snobs enjoy their distinguishing hallmarks of style - how they wear clothes, use words, where they go and gather and gossip ... Whatever the circumstances the genius has put you into, the fact of individuality defends the soul against all class-action claims. No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality, whatever your personal record of middling achievements. — James Hillman

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Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind. — James Hillman

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By seeing differently, we do 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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Psychotherapy makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. — 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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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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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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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 seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence," wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, "We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning. — James Hillman

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I have found that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories . One knows what stories can do, how they can make up worlds and transpose existence into these worlds ... One learns that worlds are made by words and not only by hammers and wires. — 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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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 tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not. — 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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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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It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth. — 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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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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Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology. — 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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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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Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible. — James Hillman

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Our dreams recover what the world forgets. — James Hillman

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Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi. — 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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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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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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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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Fear is a huge thing for older people. — James Hillman

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Anything you attend to carefully can bring blessing ... — 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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My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism). — James Hillman

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The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder. — 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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I think the worst atmosphere for a six-year-old is one in which there are no expectations whatsoever. That is, it's worse for the child to grow up in a vacuum where "whatever you do is alright, I'm sure you'll succeed." That is a statement of disinterest. It says, "I really have no fantasies for you at all." — 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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Not just any talk is conversation; not any talk raises consciousness. Good conversation has an edge: it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates: it keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. That reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness; your mind's been moved. You are at another level with your reflections. — 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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We forget that the soul has its own ancestors. — 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper. — 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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Teachers today can't take to a child. — James Hillman

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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. — 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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Sometimes we act in order not to see. — James Hillman