Quotes By James Hillman

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.

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

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.

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.