Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Well
Answers
Sometimes
Public
Tempered
Always
Situation
Quick
Think
Asks
Wherever
Thinking
Word
Slow
People
Two
Answer
Back
Short
Wells
Question

More quotes by James Hillman

Image
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
Image
I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman
Image
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
Image
I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.
James Hillman
Image
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
Image
I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
James Hillman
Image
Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be.
James Hillman
Image
Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.
James Hillman
Image
Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.
James Hillman
Image
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
Image
The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
James Hillman
Image
Fear is a huge thing for older people.
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman
Image
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
Image
You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
James Hillman
Image
We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman
Image
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.
James Hillman