Words matter. These are the best James Hillman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
We need to have an educational system that’s able to embrace all sorts of minds, and where a student doesn’t have to fit into a certain mold of learning.
It’s very hard to know what wisdom is.
The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
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 have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.
I’m the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I’m a victim again. A result.
I can’t read all the books I want to read, I can’t watch all the phenomena that interest me in the world. The work calls me, and sometimes I wonder whether this is an obsession and I should drop it, or it’s a necessity I’m obliged to fulfill.
I don’t have answers. I have questions.
We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.
I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics.
We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
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.
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.
I’m cautious about a lot of words.
When they talk about family values, it’s in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
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.
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?
The elder who is eliminating what time has done to the face, what life has done to the face, is making a statement for others to see: This is the way to be a good old person – it is to defeat this body that is doing things to you. Because you haven’t changed. Your body’s changing.
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.
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.
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.
You don’t know what you’re going to get into when you follow your bliss.
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.
Fear is a huge thing for older people.
If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
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.
It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.
We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
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.
I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
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?
