Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life Quotes

“the individual is prey to belief systems that narrow into rigid positions rather than expand to opening dialogue; the mystery is banished and therefore rendered irrelevant to all.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“By limiting our contemporary sense of truth to what can be physically validated, we have limited our deeper access to the world and de-souled it in many ways.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“the failed gods of modernism left the modern adrift in our materialist sea, awash with corporate empires whose books are cooked, governments founded on mendacity, and intellectuals intent on constructing monuments to their neuroses.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“the loss of a spiritual life underlies virtually all of our culture’s malaise”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“This tragic devaluation of the spirit has led many to reject the possibility of the transcendent and to throw themselves into the addictions and diversions of popular culture as antidotes for the pain of this great loss. It has led others to cynicism or depression.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“religion is for those afraid to go to Hell, and spirituality is for those who have been there.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The unconscious fantasy of the child is that in taking care of the other, perhaps fixing them, the child guarantees that other will be there to take care of them.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“when the gods are not experienced inwardly, they will be projected outwardly.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“One engages in work because it is meaningful, and if it is not, one changes the work.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Sadly, the majority of humanity remains trapped in the ego’s identifications with such complexes, suffering from but also encouraging the avoidance of life’s large possibilities.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“If our work does not support our soul, then the soul will exact its butcher’s bill elsewhere.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“We cannot ask a relationship, or the external, consensual world, to meet our deepest needs or give us a sense of personal worth.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“our parenting is less effective if our children do not grow beyond us toward an enlarged vision of life’s many possibilities for satisfaction of the soul.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“two requisites are necessary for sanity: work and love.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“the struggling family will be dominated by its least conscious parent.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“So frequently what appears as debilitating guilt is really a form of anxiety, the anxiety learned earlier in life as the cost of asserting oneself against the potentially abandoning or punitive parent.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“How many children have the genuine security to pursue the life they desire to lead, and know they will be supported, even if the parent might prefer other choices?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Please my parents and die within, or live my separate journey and lose their love.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents (and the ancestors too, for we are dealing here with the age-old psychological phenomenon of original sin) have not lived.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“You are precious to us; you will always have our love and support; you are here to be who you are; try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can; when you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us, but you are also here to leave us, and to go onward toward your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents . . . have not lived.” Carl Jung”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“we realize that we do not know who we are, or why we are living, or begin to sense that how we spend our now limited, precious time on this planet might really be up for grabs.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“we have to acknowledge that there is a world of hurt inside these persons who are desperately trying to “medicate” their distress with increasingly costly medication.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“By this age, the ego strength necessary for self-examination may have reached a level where it can reflect upon itself, critique itself,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“This shaky beginning marked the onset of the deepest inquiry they had ever undertaken, the risky adventure of getting to know who they really were, often quite apart from whomever they had become.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“None of them had come to therapy as a first choice. Their initial line of defense against the eruptions of the unconscious into their lives was denial. (This is our most understandable, most primitive defense,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“We are clearly the protagonist of the drama, but is it possible that we are also the author,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“we need to have lived long enough to see that we have constructed patterns in our lives—patterns in relationships, patterns at work,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up