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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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James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
Grows
Soft
Wisdom
Aging
Easy
Harder
Become
Battle
Way
Sweet
Grow
Curmudgeon
Fun
Skinned
Path
Thick

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Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.
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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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The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.
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I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.
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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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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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We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
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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.
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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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Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time no one has any leisure.
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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
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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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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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The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it's also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don't see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that's been there all along.
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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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People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.
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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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I don't think anything changes until ideas change.
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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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Whether we like it or not, men have more of the offices, more of the higher jobs, more of the seats in Congress. Men need to re-examine what their power is. We need to understand how to use it.
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