James Hillman Quotes

When I was growing up, I was told I was stupid and that I would never achieve. I suffered from dyslexia, and in those days it wasn't recognised.

I have fallen short in my life, but my faith has always brought me home.

I embrace the criticism, because ultimately (it means) the masses have seen it [my movie]. I embrace it for my father's story, for my mother's story, for my auntie, for my grandmother, who all got their teeth knocked out so I could be [where I am].

The challenges I have faced - among them material poverty, chronic illness, and being raised by a single mother - are not uncommon, but neither have they kept me from uncommon achievements.

My own father had always said the measure of a man wasn't how many times or how hard he got knocked down, but how fast he got back up. I made a pledge to myself that I would get up and emerge from this debacle better for having gone through it. I would live up to the expectation I had for myself. I would be the kind of man I wanted to be.

My mother didn't feel sorry for herself, she was left with no child support, no alimony at a very young age, with a child to raise, a high school education and she just figured it out. She didn't complain, she didn't rely upon government, she relied upon her own skill set, her own self confidence, her own drive in moxie and her own duty to me and her and she relied upon her family and her faith.

The pain that you hold is yours. There is not a single pain quite like it. Nobody else on God's green earth can feel this pain, or have the indescribable feeling of pride you will have when you overcome it. This pain is not your curse; this pain is your privilege.

It takes a lot of people years to turn a negative into a positive. It takes me, like, an album.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.

We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential?

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

It is impressive to see a person who has been battered by life in many ways, who is torn by a variety of unsolved problems, who may be alienated from many aspects of the self-but who is still fighting, still struggling, still striving to find the path to a fulfilling existence, moved by the wisdom of knowing, "I am more than my problems."

I kept asking myself if I felt different, if I was different. The answer was always yes. I was no longer nothing… How odd, I thought; it had taken my mother’s death, Father Quinel’s murder, and the desire of others to kill me to claim a life of my own.

My mother told me I said to her, at age three, 'I'm going to go to Italy and get my father in a tractor.' 'You've never seen quite so fierce a little boy as you were,' she told me. She tried to explain that I couldn't get my father in a tractor. Apparently I looked at her and narrowed my eyes and said, 'In that case, I'm going in a double-decker bus,' and stomped off. Which is kind of funny, but it's very sad, as well.

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

I held on to my better nature by my fingernails but I held on.

My sense of humor was a tool for me getting past my mother and father separating, my older brother having cerebral palsy, and the bullies in the schoolyard. I had to make them laugh to keep them off my ass. I brought that to my professional career.

My father taught me that one of the most important abilities in life is to be able to take the pain and persevere, and for years this lesson had served me well.

It's gonna take the man in me to conquer this insanity.

I have tried and I cannot find, either in scripture or in history, a strong-willed individual whom God used greatly until He allowed them to be hurt deeply.

Disease is surely one of the ways in which we are tried by life and offered the chance to be heroic. Though few of us will win Olympic gold medals or slay dragons, disease can be the spark or gift that allows many of us to live out our personal myths and become heroes.

I'm fine," [her dad] said gently. "Back on the horse, Cath.' 'What's the horse?' she sighed, watching him pull on a South High hoodie. 'Jogging? Working too much?' 'Living,' he said, a little too loud. 'Life's the horse.

We do not know what we can bear until we are put to the test. Many a delicate mother, who thought that she could not survive the death of her children, has lived to bury her husband and the last one of a large family, and in addition to all this has seen her home and last dollar swept away; yet she has had the courage to bear it all and to go on as before. When the need comes, there is a power deep within us that answers the call.

It is the measure of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.

Like I tell everyone, I say the bottom line to my life is that I've gone through torments in my life, but it made me stronger. I haven't lost my mind, I haven't become a dope fiend, I'm not a drug pusher, I'm not a stick-up man.