James Hillman quotes - page 2

You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss. (James Hillman)
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. View quote
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. View quote
James Hillman
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?" View quote
James Hillman
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. View quote
James Hillman
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. View quote
James Hillman
You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things. View quote
James Hillman
We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I'm an accident - a result - and therefore a victim. View quote
James Hillman
It's very hard to know what wisdom is. View quote
James Hillman
It's the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans. View quote
James Hillman
It's very important for men to look downward, to the next generation. (James Hillman)
Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one's character. View quote
James Hillman
The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul. View quote
James Hillman
How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount. View quote
James Hillman
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 our wandering. View quote
James Hillman
You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed. View quote
James Hillman
Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul. View quote
James Hillman
Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there's usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul. View quote
James Hillman
An individual's harmony with his or her 'own deep self' requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world. View quote
James Hillman
Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment. View quote
James Hillman
Each person enters the world "called," like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul's agenda. (James Hillman)
Pathology is not a problem to be solved, but the soul's way of working on itself. View quote
James Hillman
Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet. View quote
James Hillman
My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them. View quote
James Hillman
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. View quote
James Hillman