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I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made

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
Products
Mistake
Founding
Happiness
Phrase
Father
Fathers
Made
Phrases
Think
Pursue
Thinking
Product
Mistakes

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.
James Hillman
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Teachers today can't take to a child.
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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
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Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time no one has any leisure.
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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.
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.
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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.
James Hillman
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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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We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.
James Hillman
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To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
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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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The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.
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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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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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
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From my perspective as a depth psychologist, I see that those who have a connection with story are in better shape and have better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced.
James Hillman