James Hillman Quotes
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?
Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.
Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.
We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
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.
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.
To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.
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.
Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.
Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.
Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.
The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.
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.
Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life.
You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed.
Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering.
To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.
Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well.
An individual's harmony with his or her 'own deep self' requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.
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.
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
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.
Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?
The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm's length because they are so full of love
Yes, we worship the idea of the "self-made man" - otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea.
Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention.
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.
Art, for example, becomes "art therapy." When patients make music, it becomes "music therapy." When the arts are used for "therapy" in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.
Each person enters the world "called," like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
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?"
From my perspective as a depth psychologist, I see that those who have a connection with story are in better shape and have better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced.
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
Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.
I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.
Each morning, we return from the dream soul trying to adjust to the day world, that moment when the two souls exchange places in the driver’s seat.
