Quotes from James Hillman

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche...

miracle it is to find the right words, words that carry soul accurately

Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.

Because every exchange is always a relationship, to get the most while giving the least is unjust, unethical, antisocial, abusive, perhaps 'evil.' Yet predatory commerce ("the free market" as it is euphemistically called) operates regularly on the principle of 'get the most and pay the least.

Our dreams recover what the world forgets.

If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.

Words are like pillows: if put correctly they ease pain.

My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

Sometimes we act in order not to see.

What door is opened into soul through our wounds.

As the ego does not represent the whole psyche, so the Western mind cannot speak for the whole world.

To be sane, we must recognise our beliefs as fictions.

Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.

It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence," wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, "We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.

What ages is not merely your functions and organs, but the whole of your nature, that particular person you have come to be and already were years ago.

This is the emancipation of the nigredo from literalism. Like cures like; we cure the nigredo by becoming, as the texts say, blacker than black – archetypally black, and thereby no longer colored by all-too-human prejudices of color.

To the question, "Why am I old?" the usual answer is, "Because I am becoming dead." But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.

Perhaps Eurydice wants to remain marginal, a shade insubstantial… the mute waste in a limbo without light and without depth are a style of anima fascinations in which the absence of significance is the significance.

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?

I'm cautious about a lot of words.

It's very important for men to look downward, to the next generation

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.