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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.

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
First
Unless
Love
Perhaps
Cardinal
Virtue
Cardinals
Attention
Receives
Faith
Virtues
Hope
Hardly
Anything
Psychological
Firsts
Depends

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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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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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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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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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Teachers today can't take to a child.
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I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.
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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've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
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Too often in the west we fail to realize that even in eastern disciplines the spiritual life is not meant as an escape from the worldly life. There is karma to be fulfilled on earth, within the dharma of necessity.
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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 have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.
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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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You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
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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 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
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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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The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?
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We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
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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 anything changes until ideas change.
James Hillman