David > David's Quotes

“Whatever shaky throne we purchased at the price of numerous adjustments and backroom deals is our presumptive treasure and our sanctum.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“We have an entire culture of addictive treatment plans, of sensate distraction, and of jejune impatience that is driven by the preference of security through unconsciousness as an antidote to growth.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“What we have become is typically an assemblage of defense mechanisms and anxiety-management systems generated by the adaptive needs that our fate-fueled biographies bring to us.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Something within each of us is stirred by forms, images, values, to which others may prove indifferent or incredulous. If such images and forms speak to us, occasion resonance , then they express in outer form some analogue to what lies within.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“What I cannot accept in myself, what I cannot handle in the complexity of the world, what I fear in you, often leads me to repress you if I can.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Life hurts, and sometimes it hurts a great deal. We are extraordinarily flexible, possess genetic programming to survive, even prevail, and we gain resilience as we age, and yet we still hurt easily.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“We live in a similarly shattered Weltanschauung where cultural distractions urgently seek to mask the demise of tribal mythologies, where sex, power, money are offered up as “connections” to replace the linking to the transcendent mythic images once granted.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Achieving a more conscious participation in a richer story proves a great gift after all.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“In your relationships you sacrificed your autonomy to gain security and wound up with neither.”)”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Our story, with its many sub-stories, still courses through us, and we are still trying to figure out what it is, what it means, and what we are to do about it. In speaking of these matters in a public setting recently, someone said, “Why should I bother to think about these things?” “Well, because perhaps you are living someone else’s story if you do not,” I replied. “What does that matter if I’m happy?” she retorted. “Though I am not against happiness,” I returned, “I do consider it to be a poor measure of the worth and depth of one’s life. Throughout history, the people who brought us the most often suffered greatly, and were scarcely happy carrots.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“How difficult is it for us to change our stories by taking “counter-phobic steps” as correctives? How often do we see someone’s life devoted to compliance, hoping to curry favor and avoid retribution? How often do we see someone repeatedly miring themselves in bad relationships, hoping to wrest love, security, affirmation at last?”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Personhood is not a gift; it is a continuing struggle; the gift is attained later, and only from living a mindful journey where, prompted by an inner summons, we write our story at last.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Later—much later, if at all—we reluctantly come to recognize that those choices we made were reflective of our character, our limited field of vision, and our presumption that we knew enough to know enough.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Without a larger measure of consciousness, we cannot begin to struggle with fate. We rather remain its prisoner. It behooves all of us to look at the prevalent patterns of our lives and ask what “story” they might be serving.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“You must be successful, affluent, powerful, married to the right person,” and so on. Each child is thus launched in service to the parent’s neurosis, and gets further and further from his or her own soul.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“None of us would admit to having “bad character,” although we have all done bad things. In fact, a person who has never done anything “bad” will be a pretty superficial, infantile being, and that is a bad thing.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“The object is not to win or lose, for that is already decided, and already irrelevant80—for us it is rather to be on the playing field, with utmost exercise of élan and investment of spirit to the end.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Since so many of us are living so much longer, may we inquire if longevity itself is the goal, or is it something else? Are our lives four times richer, more meaningful, than those who lived in ancient Greece,”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Man has only his two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Nothing human is alien to me.” But can that be true? Surely the I that I know and treasure, the I that I present to you, is free of the darker sides of human conduct.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“It is much easier to deny, blame others, project elsewhere, or bury it and just keep on rolling.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“The Shadow is not just what is unconscious, it is what discomforts the sense of self we wish to have.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“was her life as lived in fact her authentic journey, or was she driven by complexes so powerful as to render her incapable of choosing anything else?”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Was a particular person a “saint” because she sacrificed her own journey in service to others; was her life as lived in fact her authentic journey, or was she driven by complexes so powerful as to render her incapable of choosing anything else?”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“people [are] likely to be Muslims or Christians more from a need to belong to a group that would provide emotional reassurance in a difficult world, rather than as a result of a personal search for truth and meaning.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“I contradict myself? So, I contradict myself! I am infinite. I contain multitudes.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“We have to recall the functional definition of the Shadow as that which renders us uncomfortable in confronting in ourselves.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Paradoxically, our ability to see something of the Shadow within ourselves sharpens our capacity to recognize shadowy actions around us.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“but I am further persuaded that sex (and its accompanying fantasy of romantic love) is now carrying the burden of much of our lost spirituality.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“My Shadow was not evil; it was the defense against being myself, my own—apparently risky, apparently too costly—self.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves