Top 60 James Hollis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.”

— James Hollis

2. “That of which we are not aware, owns us.”

— James Hollis

3. “Education derives from the verb educe, which means “to draw forth from within.” The original teaching method of Socrates has been largely displaced by professorial deference to received scholarly authority. By and large, our students are taught how to take exams but not to think, write, or find their own path.”

— James Hollis

4. “Death is only one way of dying; living partially, living fearfully, is our more common, daily collusion with death.”

— James Hollis

5. “Jung observed that everyone has a pathological secret, something so scary, so shameful perhaps, so humiliating, that one will protect it nearly any cost.”

— James Hollis

6. “What would happen to our lives, our world, if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child, saying in so many words: “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

7. “All of life is attachment and loss, an unavoidable, rhythmic exchange.”

— James Hollis

8. “Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life: intrapsychic depression is the by-product of the refusal to climb aboard.”

— James Hollis

9. “My Shadow was not evil; it was the defense against being myself, my own – apparently risky, apparently too costly – self.”

— James Hollis

10. “Men today cannot claim their identity via culture because they are obliged to find other uninitiated males as their models or succumb to the empty values of a materialistic society. Again, before healing may begin, men must acknowledge the reality of what lies within. Among those confusing emotions is a deep grief for the loss of the personal father as companion, model and support, and a deep hunger for the fathers as a source of wisdom, solace and inspiration.”

— James Hollis

11. “The transient vacuities of our cultural icons – success, peace, happiness, and distraction – pale before the question of whether or not one experiences this life as meaningful.”

— James Hollis

12. “When men feel the wound that cannot heal, they either bury themselves in woman’s arms and ask her for healing, which she cannot provide, or they hide themselves in macho pride and enforced loneliness.”

— James Hollis

13. “Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty they are courting the death of the soul, whose nature is forever churning possibility, forever seeking the larger, forever riding the melting edge of certainty’s glacier.”

— James Hollis

14. “If we are not willing to risk all, again, then we are precluded from intimacy.”

— James Hollis

15. “As the child once fantasized that its wishes governed the world, and the youth fantasized that heroism could manage to do it all, so the person in the second half of life is obliged to come to a more sober wisdom based on a humbled sense of personal limitations and the inscrutability of the world.”

— James Hollis

16. “How scary it might prove to conclude that I am essentially alone in this summons to personal consciousness, that I cannot continue to blame others for what has happened to me, that I am really out there on that tightrope over the abyss, making choices every day, and that I am truly, irrevocably responsible for my life. That I would have to grow up, stand naked before this immense brutal universe, and step in to the largeness of this journey, my journey. 109.”

— James Hollis

17. “Only a spirituality that confesses that it knows not has a shot at growing, evolving, engaging the perils and uncertainties of the journey and of staying by our side when things get rough.”

— James Hollis

18. “Thus we are forced into a difficult choice: anxiety or depression. If we move forward, as our soul insists, we may be flooded with anxiety. If we do not move forward, we will suffer the depression, the pressing down of the soul’s purpose. In such a difficult choice one must choose anxiety, for anxiety is at least the path of personal growth; depression is a stagnation and defeat of life.”

— James Hollis

19. “Paradoxically, our ability to see something of the Shadow within ourselves sharpens our capacity to recognize shadowy actions around us.”

— James Hollis

20. “Life is a loan, and we have to return it to the universe.”

— James Hollis

21. “Violent men don’t have the strength of consciousness and character to own responsibility for what is missing in their own psychological life. They pummel others for not carrying their own anguished souls.”

— James Hollis

22. “This is why Jung observed that the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.”

— James Hollis

23. “The “gift” of tragedy is not destruction, but humility.”

— James Hollis

24. “Our ego consciousness – namely, who we think we are, or what we believe real – is at best a thin wafer floating on an iridescent sea. In any moment, we view the world through a distorting lens and make choices based on what the lens allows us to see, not what lies outside its frame.”

— James Hollis

25. “The first half of life, at least for most of us, is essentially a giant, unavoidable mistake.”

— James Hollis

26. “Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well. Often their only connection with each other comes through superficial talk about outer events, such as sports and politics.”

— James Hollis

27. “The truth is, all of life is a grand, blooming ambiguity.”

— James Hollis

28. “If we realize that the assumptions by which the person has lived his or her life are collapsing, that the assembled strategies of the provisional personality are decompensating, that a world-view is falling apart, than the thrashing about is understandable. In fact, one might even conclude that there is no such thing as a crazy act if one understands the emotional context. Emotions are not chosen they choose us and have a logic of their own.”

— James Hollis

29. “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

30. “To be mindful of our fragile fate each day, in a non-morbid acknowledgment, helps us remember what is important in our life and what is not, what matters, really, and what does not.”

— James Hollis

31. “Achieving a more conscious participation in a richer story proves a great gift after all.”

— James Hollis

32. “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

33. “If you want to cure a neurosis, you have to risk something.”2.”

— James Hollis

34. “There is some debate in professional circles about whether the so-called “midlife crisis” exists.”

— James Hollis

35. “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

36. “One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

— James Hollis

37. “Depth psychology understands that the goal of life is not happiness, which is only transiently possible anyhow, but meaning, which abides.”

— James Hollis

38. “When one has been in the presence of the truly creative, the imaginatively bold, then one cannot feign unconsciousness. One is similarly summoned to largeness of soul, boldness of action. Finding and following our passion, that which touches us so deeply that it both hurts and feels right, serves individuation by pulling our potential from the depths.”

— James Hollis

39. “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

40. “Growing up spiritually means that we are asked to sort through the possibilities for ourselves, find what resonates for us, what is confirmed by our experience not the consensus of others, and be willing to stand for what has proved true for us. For this reason, the twin tasks of finding personal authority and finding a mature spirituality are inextricably linked.”

— James Hollis

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Wouldn’t a woman who paid attention to her dreams, and tried to adopt choices based on their direction and value system, be successful, even if she were departing further and further from the approval of her family?”

— James Hollis

44. “Jung once observed that we cannot grow up until we can see our parents as other adults, special to our biography certainly, wounded perhaps, but most of all simply other people who did or did not take on the largeness of their own journey. We have our own journey, for sure, and that is large enough to take us beyond our personal history toward our full potential.”

— James Hollis

45. “Where am I asking others to take responsibility for my life? Let’s face it – we would all love to be taken care of. We all are recovering children who project the dynamics of intrapsychic parent onto an institution, an ideology... Growing up is ever more difficult because it requires letting go of old expectations of rescue and redemption. We are it; this is it; this is as good as it gets, and we better deal with it.”

— James Hollis

46. “Where do you refuse to grow up, wait for certainty of wisdom before choosing, hope for solutions to emerge fully formed, expect rescue, or wait for a guru to make sense of it all for you?”

— James Hollis

47. “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

48. “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

49. “The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego.”

— James Hollis

50. “Walnut Trees of Altenburg: The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.2.”

— James Hollis