Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
Miserable
Cold
Dysfunction
Instead
Functioning
Seeing
Stops
Makes
Sets
Phenomenon
Depression
Damn
More quotes by James Hillman
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
Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.
James Hillman
We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.
James Hillman
You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
James Hillman
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
I don't think anything changes until ideas change.
James Hillman
It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.
James Hillman
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
I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.
James Hillman
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
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
We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
James Hillman
Each person enters the world called, like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
James Hillman
I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.
James Hillman
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
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
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.
James Hillman
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
I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
James Hillman
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.
James Hillman