Top 140 James Hillman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That’s a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be.”

— James Hillman

52. “Aptitude can show calling, but it isn’t the only indicator. Ineptitude or dysfunction may reveal calling more than talent, curiously enough.”

— James Hillman

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

— James Hillman

54. “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.”

— James Hillman

55. “What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child’s destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child.”

— James Hillman

56. “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.”

— James Hillman

57. “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.”

— James Hillman

58. “It’s the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.”

— James Hillman

59. “Many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic.”

— James Hillman

60. “We vote for Perot. We think he’s a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It’s unbelievable, yet it’s part of that worship of individuality.”

— James Hillman

61. “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.”

— James Hillman

62. “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.”

— James Hillman

63. “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.”

— James Hillman

64. “I think there is such a thing as a bad seed that comes to flower in certain people. The danger with that theory is that we begin to look for those “troublemakers” early on and try to weed them out. That’s very dangerous, because it could work against kids who are just routine troublemakers.”

— James Hillman

65. “Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?”

— James Hillman

66. “It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.”

— James Hillman

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

— James Hillman

68. “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.”

— James Hillman

69. “Psychology ideally means giving soul to language and finding language for soul.”

— James Hillman

70. “What door is opened into soul through our wounds.”

— James Hillman

71. “The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm’s length because they are so full of love.”

— James Hillman

72. “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.”

— James Hillman

73. “I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.”

— James Hillman

74. “You don’t attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault.”

— James Hillman

75. “In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it’s hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it’s not a vocation.”

— James Hillman

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

— James Hillman

77. “All we can do when we think of kids today is think of more hours of school, earlier age at the computer, and curfews. Who would want to grow up in that world?”

— James Hillman

78. “The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.”

— James Hillman

79. “If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.”

— James Hillman

80. “The deepest subjectivity is not personal.”

— James Hillman

81. “We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child’s beauty and singling that child out. That’s how the mentor system works – you’re caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.”

— James Hillman

82. “The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?”

— James Hillman

83. “We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet...”

— James Hillman

84. “The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it’s also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don’t see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that’s been there all along.”

— James Hillman

85. “Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible.”

— James Hillman

86. “You don’t know what you’re going to get into when you follow your bliss.”

— James Hillman

87. “Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure.”

— James Hillman

88. “Our dreams recover what the world forgets.”

— James Hillman

89. “Fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollable by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.”

— James Hillman

90. “It’s a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood – the sense that motherhood isn’t itself a calling – also arises from economic pressure.”

— James Hillman

91. “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.”

— James Hillman

92. “I don’t think you can revive traditions on purpose.”

— James Hillman

93. “We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.”

— James Hillman

94. “It’s not enough just to be a mother. It’s not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them.”

— James Hillman

95. “Calling can refer not only to ways of doing – meaning work – but also to ways of being.”

— James Hillman

96. “Without time for loss you don’t have time for soul.”

— James Hillman

97. “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.”

— James Hillman

98. “Yes, we worship the idea of the “self-made man” – otherwise we’d go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea.”

— James Hillman

99. “We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.”

— James Hillman

100. “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?”

— James Hillman