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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
Phenomenon
Depression
Damn
Miserable
Dysfunction
Cold
Functioning
Instead
Stops
Seeing
Makes
Sets

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You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
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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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The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
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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.
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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.
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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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The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
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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.
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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
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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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Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time no one has any leisure.
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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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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.
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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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I'm cautious about a lot of words
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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?
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