Quotes By James Hillman

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It's very hard to know what wisdom is.

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.

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.

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.