Quote

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
Things
Images
Love
Keeping
Flammable
Fantasy
Asbestos
Material
Wrapping
Materials
Fantasies
Arms
Psyche
Full
Highly
Always
Length

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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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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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I don't think anything changes until ideas change.
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Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.
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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 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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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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We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
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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.
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Each person enters the world called, like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
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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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The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
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We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.
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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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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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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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We're an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security.
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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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We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
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