Quote

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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James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
Ideas
Answer
Predestined
Coming
Robs
Already
Inquire
Answers
Vitality
Effort
Inquiry
Purpose
Efforts
Idea
Conclusion
Death
Passionate
Empties

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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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Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.
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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
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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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We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
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Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time no one has any leisure.
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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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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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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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Each person enters the world called, like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
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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.
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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.
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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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Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.
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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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We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.
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Fear is a huge thing for older people.
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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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It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.
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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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