James Hillman Quotes

I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made

I'm cautious about a lot of words

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.

Without time for loss you don't have time for soul.

The circumstances, including my body and my parents, whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice and I do not understand this because I have forgotten

You are born with a character; it is given, a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth...Each person enters the world called.

Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.

We're an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security.

I know my own deficiencies, one of which is that I had lived away from America for such a long time. It's called expatriate

The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?

It's very important for men to look downward, to the next generation

If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.

I don't think anything changes until ideas change.

The comic spirit masquerades in all things we say and do. We are each a clown and do not need to put on a white face.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche.

I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.

Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.

We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.

Food is so fundamental, more so than sexuality, aggression, or learning, that it is astounding to realize the neglect of food and eating in depth psychology.

Fear is a huge thing for older people.

What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child's destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child.

By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God

We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.

Calling can refer not only to ways of doing - meaning work - but also to ways of being.

Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.

The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.

Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible.

In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it's hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it's not a vocation.

We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.

Reconnecting to the animal means getting to a more sensitive, more artful and more humorous place in the psyche.

People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.

It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.

My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.

Well, if I'm only a result of past causes, then I'm a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here.

It's very hard to know what wisdom is

Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure.

Teachers today can't take to a child.

In the cosmology that's behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything.

It's not enough just to be a mother. It's not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them.

I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.

So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job.

Many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic.

The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?

The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world.

You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault.

It's the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.

We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.

Whether we like it or not, men have more of the offices, more of the higher jobs, more of the seats in Congress. Men need to re-examine what their power is. We need to understand how to use it.

We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.