Quotes By James Hillman

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.

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

Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.

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.