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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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James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
Virtue
Goal
Less
Inferiority
Inspirational
Vice
Human
Ideal
Humans
Vices
Goals
Ideals

More quotes by 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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To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
James Hillman
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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.
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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Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time no one has any leisure.
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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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 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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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.
James Hillman
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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
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The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.
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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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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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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Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.
James Hillman
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You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
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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Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.
James Hillman
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We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
James Hillman
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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
James Hillman