James Hollis Quotes

#1. The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego.

James Hollis

#2. To experience some healing within yourself, and to contribute healing to the world, you are summoned to wade through the muck from time to time.

James Hollis

#3. Death is only one way of dying; living partially, living fearfully, is our more common, daily collusion with death.

James Hollis

#4. To become a person does not necessarily mean to be well adjusted, well adapted, approved of by others. It means to become who you are. We are meant to become more eccentric, more peculiar, more odd. We are not meant just to fit in. We are here to be different. We are here to be the individual.

James Hollis

#5. A fear-driven spirituality will always diminish rather than enlarge.

James Hollis

#6. What I refuse to face within myself will meet me in the exterior world through you, not as you are, but as I have so construed you.

James Hollis

#7. Third choice was to strike off toward some new projection - a new job, a better (different) relationship, a seductive ideology, or sometimes to drift into some unconscious "self-treatment plan" such as an addiction or an affair.

James Hollis

#8. We serve the world by finding out what feeds us, and, having been fed, then share our gifts with others.

James Hollis

#9. Is not our chief neurosis - by which I mean our estrangement from nature - our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity.

James Hollis

#10. In the end, we are only tiny frightened animals, doing our best to survive amid other tiny frightened animals.

James Hollis

#11. That of which we are not aware, owns us.

James Hollis

#12. As children we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to the great sea which surges within us as well.

James Hollis

#13. The transient vacuities of our cultural icons - success, peace, happiness, and distraction - pale before the question of whether or not one experiences this life as meaningful.

James Hollis

#14. There is some debate in professional circles about whether the so-called "midlife crisis" exists.

James Hollis

#15. The paradox of individuation is that we best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.

James Hollis

#16. The sons shaped their feet with the shoes of their fathers. To the plight of their mothers, the daughters surrendered their dreams." - "THE RIVER," LARRY D. THOMAS

James Hollis

#17. The capacity for growth depends on one's ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be "solved," then no change will occur.

James Hollis

#18. Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises..:

James Hollis

#19. A neurosis is wherever we are allied against our true nature.

James Hollis

#20. Teachers Lounge is a web series I co-created with Hollis James. We intentionally left the apostrophe out to turn Lounge into a verb. The show is about teachers lounging around, wasting time.

Ted Alexandro

#21. When men feel the wound that cannot heal, they either bury themselves in woman's arms and ask her for healing, which she cannot provide, or they hide themselves in macho pride and enforced loneliness.

James Hollis

#22. In short, the greatest gift of relationship proves to be that as the result of encountering each other, we are obliged to grow larger than we had planned.

James Hollis

#23. David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision

James Hollis

#24. We are all meaning-seeking, meaning creating creatures and when we experience the loss of meaning, we suffer.

James Hollis

#25. Destiny commands ... and imposes a sacred obligation to show up in the face of one's desire for a normal, casual life ... there are other forces afoot of which consciousness has only the dimmest of understandings ...

James Hollis

#26. the task is not to find the object115 but to live the journey, with passion, and risk, and commitment, and danger.

James Hollis

#27. The truth is, all of life is a grand, blooming ambiguity.

James Hollis

#28. If we are not willing to risk all, again, then we are precluded from intimacy.

James Hollis

#29. The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

James Hollis

#30. Fear of our own depths is the enemy.

James Hollis

#31. As the child once fantasized that its wishes governed the world, and the youth fantasized that heroism could manage to do it all, so the person in the second half of life is obliged to come to a more sober wisdom based on a humbled sense of personal limitations and the inscrutability of the world.

James Hollis

#32. The "gift" of tragedy is not destruction, but humility

James Hollis

#33. The purpose of therapy is not to remove suffering but to move through it to an enlarged consciousness that can sustain the polarity of painful opposites.

James Hollis

#34. Walnut Trees of Altenburg: The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.2

James Hollis

#35. The truth about intimate relationships is that they can never be any better than our relationship with ourselves.

James Hollis

#36. To be mindful of our fragile fate each day, in a non-morbid acknowledgment, helps us remember what is important in our life and what is not, what matters, really, and what does not.

James Hollis

#37. (It has become clear to me, for example, that aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities. Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging.)

James Hollis

#38. Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither. William Wordsworth,

James Hollis

#39. The only requisite to entry into the Middle Passage is to have discovered that one does not know who one is, that there are no rescuers, no Mommy or Daddy, and that one's fellow travelers will do well to survive themselves.

James Hollis

#40. One of the bridges between sexes, to be sure, is sex. But men, too often feeling deficient in discourse, place too much emphasis on intercourse.

James Hollis