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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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James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
Social
Bags
Another
Guarantees
Back
Plan
Able
Air
Everything
Plans
Take
Wants
Security
Society

More quotes by James Hillman

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Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid it's also in the system, the society.
James Hillman
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I don't think anything changes until ideas change.
James Hillman
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Fear is a huge thing for older people.
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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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 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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The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
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 you can revive traditions on purpose.
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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We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
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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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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Each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver’s seat.
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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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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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.
James Hillman
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Teachers today can't take to a child.
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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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