Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
James Hillman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 12
Died: 2011
Died: October 27
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
Atlantic City
New Jersey
Easy
Harder
Become
Battle
Way
Sweet
Grow
Curmudgeon
Fun
Skinned
Path
Thick
Grows
Soft
Wisdom
Aging
More quotes by James Hillman
We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
James Hillman
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
We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.
James Hillman
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
Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.
James Hillman
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
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.
James Hillman
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
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.
James Hillman
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.
James Hillman
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.
James Hillman
We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.
James Hillman
I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.
James Hillman
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.
James Hillman
To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
James Hillman
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
If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.
James Hillman
I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
James Hillman
You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
James Hillman
It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.
James Hillman