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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.

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
Look
Begin
Looks
Early
Troublemakers
Thing
Danger
Troublemaker
Trying
Theory
Seed
Work
Dangerous
Weed
Think
Comes
Routine
Thinking
Kids
Seeds
People
Certain
Flower

More quotes by James Hillman

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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.
James Hillman
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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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Yes, we worship the idea of the self-made man - otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea.
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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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I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can't go back over that again. I can't put that into a two-word answer. I can't. Wherever I go, people say, Can I ask you a quick question? It's always, a quick question. Well, my answers are slow.
James Hillman
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Art, for example, becomes art therapy. When patients make music, it becomes music therapy. When the arts are used for therapy in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.
James Hillman
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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.
James Hillman
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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
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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
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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.
James Hillman
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The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
James Hillman
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I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
James Hillman
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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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As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.
James Hillman
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We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
James Hillman
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We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
James Hillman
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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?
James Hillman
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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
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I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.
James Hillman
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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.
James Hillman