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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
Analytical
Despair
Expect
Demand
Hope
Nothing

More quotes by James Hillman

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We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.
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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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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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Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
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Each person enters the world called, like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.
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The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.
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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
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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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I don't think anything changes until ideas change.
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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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Fear is a huge thing for older people.
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You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
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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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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.
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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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