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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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James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
Arms
Psyche
Full
Highly
Always
Length
Things
Images
Love
Keeping
Flammable
Fantasy
Asbestos
Material
Wrapping
Materials
Fantasies

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Each person enters the world called, like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
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Teachers today can't take to a child.
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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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We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
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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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Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time no one has any leisure.
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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
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We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
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Each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver’s seat.
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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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We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
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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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I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
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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?
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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
James Hillman