Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life Quotes

“so much we do serves the values of collectivity and violates the essential nature of our individual selves.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“You are always accountable for living your life, and not someone else’s.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Wherever they were blocked, so we may be blocked, or suffer the drive to overcome their limitation,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Whose life have I been living?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“the primal messages internalized and are deeply ingrained by daily repetition in the years when we are most impressionable, most dependent, least capable of rational reflection.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than textbooks a foot thick could give him,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“each swampland visitation is an enrichment, for it is an opening to a deepened consciousness, which can only be purchased through the experience”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“A life without inner contradiction is only half a life, or else a life in the Beyond which is destined only for angels.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“the goal of life is not happiness but meaning.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The ongoing curriculum of life does not demand that we avoid suffering; it asks instead that we live more meaningfully in the face of it.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Only the psychotic or unconscious are free of anxiety, and what a price they have paid.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“What is depression but life wishing to express itself but being “pressed down”? What wishes to live within us? Find that, and give it energy, value, and enactment in the world, and the depression will lift.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“if we are not living in accord with the intent of our soul, depression is likely to follow.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“What humankind has learned over and over is that the more we seem to know, the larger the mystery grows.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“To bear the anxiety of doubt is to be led to openness; openness leads to revelation; revelation leads to discovery; discovery leads to enlargement.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The suppression of doubt ensures that we are left with a partial truth, a one-sided value, a prejudicial narrowing of the richness that life has to bring.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The German word for “serenity” is Gelassenheit, which could be translated more literally as “the condition of having let go.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“the too familiar enemy that aborts promise, sabotages capacity, and keeps one from joyful immersion in the journey of life. The only antidote to this form of paralyzing guilt is resolve, the determination to risk being who we are meant to be by stepping into choices that enlarge rather than bind us to the past.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Guilt then acts as an internal governor, shutting down our natural selves and recalling the agenda of adaptation rather than authenticity.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“As children we learn that our safe passage through this world depends on meeting the conditions set for us by our respective environments.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Guilt denied will find some other way through which the piper will be paid. The capacity to accept responsibility for this harm, for choices made, for choices not made marks the maturity level of the ego”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Hence the way to the Self begins with conflict.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Without journey, risk, conflict, we are already spiritually dead and are simply waiting for the body to drop away as well.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“We all have a fantasy of arriving at a conflict-free plateau or a sunlit glen without struggle, without the demand for increasing consciousness, without being pulled deeper and further than we wish to travel.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“If we are free of suffering, we are less likely to engage with those questions that ultimately define who we are.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“If something resonates within, it is somehow about us, and for us, and if it does not, it will only betray the soul in the long run, no matter how much ego wills or tradition venerates.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Dream images are an incredible gift from the soul. Who then, are we, to reject them, treat them casually, rather than pay careful attention to what the soul is seeking to say to us?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Nature does not waste energy.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“walk into the sterile kingdoms of atheism and materialism, in which no transcendent expression will be found.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“persistent avoidance of personal spiritual maturation and humbling service to the mystery.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up