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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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James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
People
Reveal
Useful
Asks
Others
May
Wells
Well
Important

More quotes by 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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Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.
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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We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.
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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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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We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child's beauty and singling that child out. That's how the mentor system works - you're caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.
James Hillman
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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.
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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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
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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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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
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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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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
James Hillman
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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.
James Hillman
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We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
James Hillman
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Fear is a huge thing for older people.
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 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
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We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
James Hillman