What Matters Most Quotes

“We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. 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. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises..:”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“(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, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“The “gift” of tragedy is not destruction, but humility”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Death is only one way of dying; living partially, living fearfully, is our more common, daily collusion with death.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“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, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“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, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“The truth is, all of life is a grand, blooming ambiguity.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“This is an example of what Jung called “the regressive restoration of the persona,” namely, the re-identification with a former position, role, ideology because it offers a predictable content, security, and script. In the face of the new and uncertain, we often return to the old place, which is why we so often stop growing. (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.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“So, then, now you know your task: to become what the gods want, not what your parents want, not what your tribe wants, but what the gods want, and what your psyche will support if consciousness so directs.”
― James Hollis, Ph.D., 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

“Fate is what is given to us; destiny is what we are summoned to become. In the interplay of the two, human character plays a role. Hubris, or the fantasy that we know enough to know enough, seduces us toward choices that lead to unintended consequences. Hamartia, the failure to see clearly enough, to see humbly enough, is a lens through which we imperfectly envision the world, unavoidably distorting and reductive, but convincing at the moment nonetheless.”
― James Hollis PhD, 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“the task is not to find the object115 but to live the journey, with passion, and risk, and commitment, and danger.”
― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“Notice how shame, consciously or unconsciously, pulls us away from risk, ratifies our negative sense of worth through self-sabotage, or compels us into frenetic efforts at overcompensation, grandiosity, or yearning for validation that never comes. How much each of us needs to remember theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of grace as accepting the fact that we are accepted, despite the fact that we are unacceptable.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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