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You are born with a character it is given, a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth...Each person enters the world called.

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
Persons
Gift
Person
Birth
World
Called
Upon
Born
Given
Guardians
Stories
Enters
Character
Guardian

More quotes by James Hillman

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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.
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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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.
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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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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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 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 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
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Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid it's also in the system, the society.
James Hillman
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It's not enough just to be a mother. It's not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them.
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.
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.
James Hillman
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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
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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.
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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We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
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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I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.
James Hillman
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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.
James Hillman
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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