A Sad Philosophy

"My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I’m not a sad man, and I don’t believe I sadden anyone else. In other words, the fact that I don’t put my philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell, or, rather, my faith in the human race is stronger then my intellectual analysis of it; there lies the fountain of youth in which my heart is continually bathing.” -- Antonio Machado

Hope and Hopelessness

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up)

A Man After My Heart

"I said we were addicted to innocence, we're also addicted to newness. Every bloody thing in America has to be new, why?...Why are we talking about emergence, evolution...Why are we talking about what the hell's coming, let's face that right off the bat. We know what's here, and it's pretty bloody serious...we are in a very serious destructive phase, and it doesn't do us any good to be wishful and hopeful, it does us a lot more good to be faithful to what is, what really is, and to struggle with it."-- James Hillman in a 2005 debate with Deepak Chopra

Green

"Hope and growth, like youth, are green."--James Hillman

The Hopeful Illusion

"Most men, the huge majority, in fact all of us, are dyed-in-the-wool Christians, fully immersed in hope. We are unconcsiously converts to the hopeful illusion. But hope itself converts into what it covers, its ever-faithful nightime companion, despair, and we have been instructed, deceitfully, in only the the upper half of this truth. Look up; and new day is coming!"--James Hillman, pg.216, A Terrible Love of War

Give up Hope

"Give up hope; you don't need hope."--James Hillman

Looking into the Future

Yesterday the day got away from me, so I forgot to post. This was all I had in mind to post yesterday.

"When people look into the future and give up hope, it's because they don't know
what to DO about the bad things they see."--Daniel Quinn, from his essay on Hope

Control and Hope

Getting ready to carry some mail for the United States Postal Service today.

I came across this quote and interview that resonated with me over at Timothy Scott Bennett's Facebook page:

"I don’t think we need hope. I think we need imagination. We need to imagine a future which can’t be planned for and can’t be controlled. I find that people who talk about hope are often really talking about control. They hope desperately that they can keep control of the way things are panning out. Keep the lights on, keep the emails flowing, keep the nice bits of civilisation and lose the nasty ones; keep control of their narrative, the world they understand. Giving up hope, to me, means giving up the illusion of control and accepting that the future is going to be improvised, messy, difficult."