Top 140 James Hillman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.”

— James Hillman

2. “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.”

— James Hillman

3. “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.”

— James Hillman

4. “By seeing differently, we do differently.”

— James Hillman

5. “We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.”

— James Hillman

6. “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.”

— James Hillman

7. “Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.”

— James Hillman

8. “Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.”

— James Hillman

9. “The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.”

— James Hillman

10. “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.”

— James Hillman

11. “The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.”

— James Hillman

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12. “Pathology is not a problem to be solved, but the soul’s way of working on itself.”

— James Hillman

13. “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.”

— James Hillman

14. “Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.”

— James Hillman

15. “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.”

— James Hillman

16. “We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.”

— James Hillman

17. “Each person enters the world called.”

— James Hillman

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

— James Hillman

19. “I’m cautious about a lot of words.”

— James Hillman

20. “To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.”

— James Hillman

21. “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.”

— James Hillman

22. “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.”

— James Hillman

23. “My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.”

— James Hillman

24. “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.”

— James Hillman

25. “In the cosmology that’s behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything.”

— James Hillman

26. “How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don’t think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it’s a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation – like Charles Manson.”

— James Hillman

27. “Fear is a huge thing for older people.”

— James Hillman

28. “Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way – whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.”

— James Hillman

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

— James Hillman

30. “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.”

— James Hillman

31. “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.”

— James Hillman

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

— James Hillman

33. “Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depends perhaps the other cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first receives attention.”

— James Hillman

34. “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.”

— James Hillman

35. “The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?”

— James Hillman

36. “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.”

— James Hillman

37. “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.”

— James Hillman

38. “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.”

— James Hillman

39. “Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.”

— James Hillman

40. “To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.”

— James Hillman

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

— James Hillman

42. “The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.”

— James Hillman

43. “I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I’m in the psyche...”

— James Hillman

44. “I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can’t go back over that again. I can’t put that into a two-word answer. I can’t. Wherever I go, people say, “Can I ask you a quick question?” It’s always, “a quick question.” Well, my answers are slow.”

— James Hillman

45. “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.”

— James Hillman

46. “People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That’s a very important change in our collective psychology.”

— James Hillman

47. “The soul of our civilization depends upon the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture calls for a culture of the imagination.”

— James Hillman

48. “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 face.”

— James Hillman

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49. “The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.”

— James Hillman

50. “Well, if I’m only a result of past causes, then I’m a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here.”

— James Hillman