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To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
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
Nothing
Analytical
Despair
Expect
Demand
Hope
More quotes by 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
Each person enters the world called, like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
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
The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it's also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don't see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that's been there all along.
James Hillman
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
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
We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
James Hillman
Teachers today can't take to a child.
James Hillman
Fear is a huge thing for older people.
James Hillman
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
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
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
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.
James Hillman
We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
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 you can revive traditions on purpose.
James Hillman
I'm cautious about a lot of words
James Hillman
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
The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?
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