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Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.

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
Soul
Mythology
Psychology
Ultimately
Study
Stories

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We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
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You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
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Yes, we worship the idea of the self-made man - otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea.
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We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
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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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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.
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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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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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It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.
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To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
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As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.
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I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
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I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.
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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.
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We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.
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The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?
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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
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Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention.
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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.
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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.
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