Quotes By James Hillman

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

We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.

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.

Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.

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 same thing with psychotherapy.

Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here.

I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.

We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?

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

We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.

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.

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

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.

It's important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from me? That may very well reveal what you are here for.

The older people that one admires seem to be fearless. They go right out into the world. It's astounding. Maybe they can't see or they can't hear, but they walk out into the street and take life as it comes. They're models of courage, in a strange way.

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.

It's very hard to know what wisdom is.

In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.

Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough.

Loss means losing what was We want to change but we don't want to lose. Without time for loss, we don't have time for soul.

It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.

Remember that in the early days of the feminist movement, they refused to have a leader; different women would just stand up and speak. The early feminists were very careful to not put what was spontaneously arising back in the old bottle.

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

Fear is a huge thing for older people.

When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.

All we can do when we think of kids today is think of more hours of school, earlier age at the computer, and curfews. Who would want to grow up in that world?

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.

As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.

We carve out risk-free lives where nothing happens.