Quotes By James Hillman

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world?

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

I can't read all the books I want to read, I can't watch all the phenomena that interest me in the world. The work calls me, and sometimes I wonder whether this is an obsession and I should drop it, or it's a necessity I'm obliged to fulfill.

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

The elder who is eliminating what time has done to the face, what life has done to the face, is making a statement for others to see: This is the way to be a good old person - it is to defeat this body that is doing things to you. Because you haven't changed. Your body's changing.

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

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.

Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.

You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.

The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.

Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path... this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.

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.

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.