James Hillman Quotes

95 quotes in 1462 categories

• The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty…
• The comic spirit masquerades in all things we say and do. We are each a clown and do not need to put on a white…
• 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…
• How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we…
• We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
• 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…
• We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden…
• By seeing differently, we do differently
• I am not caused by my history-my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image.
• 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…
• Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.
• Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.
• 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
• 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's very important for men to look downward, to the next generation
• It's very hard to know what wisdom is
• I'm cautious about a lot of words
• 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…
• 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…
• Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign. I confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors. There is a strategy,…

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