Quotes from James Hillman

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.

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.

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.

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

By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God

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.

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 stopped imagining.

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.

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 are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.

Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.

Food is so fundamental, more so than sexuality, aggression, or learning, that it is astounding to realize the neglect of food and eating in depth psychology.

Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and 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.

The culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world?

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.

Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.

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 have forgotten.

I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness.

You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.

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

Teachers today can't take to a child.

Futurism is another American myth: whether Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan or Obama, American presidents all come into office with a new program, and the conviction that the country is going to be better than ever.