Why Good People Do Bad Things Quotes

“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, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“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, 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

“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

“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

“Generally speaking, people are drawn toward intimate relationships either because they are opposites who will compensate each other, or because they are complementary, which means that not only their conscious likes and dislikes line up, but their complexes as well.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“What I cannot admit within, which by definition is a Shadow issue, I can militantly deny without. This is why I become the fanatic and must get you to agree with me, through coercion if need be. If we agree, then, I must be right, and therefore, I will be secure.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Food disorders are rampant, for food offers archaic oral gratification and the immediate hint of emotional nourishment. Work addiction is common as we project our well-being upon such abstractions as success, getting ahead, economic security, and sundry other ways of avoiding the existential abyss over which we always hang. How many of us are comfortable with Walt Whitman’s invitation to loaf and invite the soul?”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Since we share a common humanity, and somewhat common culture, we often share history-driven energies around money, power, sexuality, food, and the like. While our ancestors could project the origin of these splinter selves externally onto a Devil, or an Evil One, the modern has a greater likelihood of recognizing that these darker thoughts and acts come from within us, and that we, in the end, are responsible for them.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“that we had destroyed indigenous civilizations and forcefully placed them in concentration camps called reservations,58 that we had sanctified by law that most hideous of human practices, “the peculiar institution” of slavery, and that even now, awash in affluence as we are, nearly 20 percent of our population are going to bed hungry every night,”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“(Remember Blake’s telling hyperbole that it is better to murder an infant in its cradle than to nurse unacted desires? He must have had a strong pre-Freudian intimation of the price of repression, and the twisting of the soul that results.)”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“With deliberate hyperbole, William Blake once wrote that it is “better to murder an infant sleeping in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” What this visionary, a century before Freud, meant was that the sustained deflection of eros will sooner or later pathologize in destructive ways. It is better, then, to find a way to honor that energy than to have it enter the world in a distorted form.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Not only do these theologies, and today’s pop psychologies, reinforce the ego, but they sanctify and legitimize our complexes, as well.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“It is the psychologically immature, the spiritually jejune that lusts for certainty, even at the expense of truth, rigorous investigation, and consideration of alternatives.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“The examined life will oblige us to consider that all issues, all issues, have more than one facet to consider, that our capacity for self-delusion is very strong, that we are always at least part of the problem, and that we will ultimately walk right into what we have fled, sooner or later.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Many learned that matters of sexual character were not permissible in their family or religion, and so they associated their own natural impulses and desires as something evil, or at best furtive and contaminated. So, too, our genuine spiritual aspirations, our honest questions, curiosities, and intimations of the soul, grow suspect. The by-product of our necessary collusion with the realpolitik of childhood vulnerability is guilt, shame, inhibition, and most of all, self-alienation. We all, still today, reenact these collusions, suffer this shame, and retreat from our wholeness. Ultimately, the price of obligatory collusion is neurosis, an experience of suffering occasioned by the split between our nature and our cultural imperatives.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Those who have experienced early relationships as invasive will suffer a schizoid split in their psyche and, fearing intimacy, will find ways to distance themselves through diversions and emotional reserve.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Who wants an ancient mariner to show up at the wedding feast with the shadowy albatross of psychological wisdom about his neck?”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“four categorical ways in which the Shadow manifests in our lives. They are found when the Shadow a) remains unconscious, albeit active in our lives; b) is disowned by being projected onto others; c) usurps consciousness by possessing us; or d) broadens consciousness through recognition, dialogue, and assimilation of its contents.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“Be kind. Everyone you meet has a very large problem.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

“For this reason, our adult relationships have a strong tendency toward repetition of early family-of-origin dynamics.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“все мы – выздоравливающие дети, которым порой случается путаться в больших телах, больших ролях, больших последствиях. Различны только наша сила, наша жизнестойкость, наше желание добиваться своего.”
― James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves