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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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James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
Seeing
Stops
Makes
Sets
Phenomenon
Depression
Damn
Miserable
Cold
Dysfunction
Instead
Functioning

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We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
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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.
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Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.
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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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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.
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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.
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The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.
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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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Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.
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I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
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I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.
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To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
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It's not enough just to be a mother. It's not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them.
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We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
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It's the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.
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