James Hollis Quotes

• In the second half of life, the questions become: 'Who, apart from the roles you play, are you? What does the soul ask of you? Do you have the wherewithal to shift course, to deconstruct your painfully achieved identity, risking failure, marginalization and loss of collective approval?' No small task.

  James Hollis

  Loss, Play, Soul

  53 Copy quote

• We are not here to fit in...we are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being...we are here to become more and more ourselves.

  James Hollis

  Self, Different, Mosaics

  37 Copy quote

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

  James Hollis

  Intimate Relationships, Intimate, Our Relationship

  James Hollis (1993). “The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife”, p.47, Inner City Books

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• 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

  Being Yourself, Mean, Differences

  84 Copy quote

• 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

  World, Faces, Refuse

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• The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes.
  The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation.
  We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice.
  When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood.
  We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.

  James Hollis

  Hero, Voice, Knowing

  James Hollis (1993). “The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife”, p.116, Inner City Books

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

  James Hollis

  World, Share, Feds

  James Hollis (2008). “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life”, p.35, Penguin

  33 Copy quote

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

  James Hollis

  Strange, Surprise, Ambiguity

  James Hollis (2008). “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life”, p.156, Penguin

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Moving, Opposites

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Responsibility, Forever, Growth

  James Hollis (1993). “The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife”, p.7, Inner City Books

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• 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

  Simple, World, Able

  James Hollis (2005). “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up”, p.72, Penguin

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

  James Hollis

  Loss, Creating, Suffering

  31 Copy quote

• We best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.

  James Hollis

  Intimate Relationships, Needs, Becoming

  James Hollis (1993). “The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife”, p.99, Inner City Books

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• How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?

  James Hollis

  Jealous, Insecure, Wind

  32 Copy quote

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

  James Hollis

  Neurosis, True Nature

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Healing, Wade, World

  31 Copy quote

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

  James Hollis

  Animal, Tiny, Ends

  39 Copy quote

• Fear of our own depths is the enemy.

  James Hollis

  Fear, Enemy, Depth

  13 Copy quote

• One of the most powerful shocks of the Middle Passage is the collapse of our tacit contract with the universe-the assumption that if we act correctly, if we are of good heart and good intentions, things will work out. We assume a reciprocity with the universe. If we do our part, the universe will comply. Many ancient stories, including the Book of Job, painfully reveal the fact that there is no such contract, and everyone who goes through the Middle Passage is made aware of it.

  James Hollis

  Jobs, Powerful, Book

  James Hollis (1993). “The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife”, p.41, Inner City Books

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• Doubt is a profound and effective spiritual motivation. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible. Doubt is unsettling to the ego and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by preferring certainties never grow.

  James Hollis

  Spiritual, Motivation, Imagination

  28 Copy quote

• Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others.

  James Hollis

  Black And White, Journey, Today

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• 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

  Daddy, Doe, Middle

  12 Copy quote

• In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles.

  James Hollis

  Spiritual, Lying, Fall

  James Hollis (2008). “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life”, p.101, Penguin

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• 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

  Destiny, Understanding, Desire

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Sea, Sound

  James Hollis, David H. Rosen (2002). “The Archetypal Imagination”, p.119, Texas A&M University Press

  18 Copy quote

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