Top 140 James Hillman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It’s better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.”

— James Hillman

102. “I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics.”

— James Hillman

103. “This is the emancipation of the nigredo from literalism. Like cures like; we cure the nigredo by becoming, as the texts say, blacker than black – archetypally black, and thereby no longer colored by all-too-human prejudices of color.”

— James Hillman

104. “Words are like pillows: if put correctly they ease pain.”

— James Hillman

105. “So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job.”

— James Hillman

106. “From my perspective as a depth psychologist, I see that those who have a connection with story are in better shape and have better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced.”

— James Hillman

107. “Too often in the west we fail to realize that even in eastern disciplines the spiritual life is not meant as an escape from the worldly life. There is karma to be fulfilled on earth, within the dharma of necessity.”

— James Hillman

108. “I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not.”

— James Hillman

109. “I don’t think anything changes until ideas change.”

— James Hillman

110. “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?”

— James Hillman

111. “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.”

— James Hillman

112. “Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being.”

— James Hillman

113. “To the question, “Why am I old?” the usual answer is, “Because I am becoming dead.” But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.”

— James Hillman

114. “The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.”

— James Hillman

115. “The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking.”

— James Hillman

116. “Why do I prefer insurance to the invisible guarantees of existence?”

— James Hillman

117. “Sometimes we act in order not to see.”

— James Hillman

118. “We’re an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security.”

— James Hillman

119. “So it is customary to see in a mother’s ideals and intensity of ambition what is carried out by one or another of her children. According to biographers, the source of success appears to lie in a mother’s doting – or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.”

— James Hillman

120. “Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.”

— James Hillman

121. “It’s very important for men to look downward, to the next generation.”

— James Hillman

122. “We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.”

— James Hillman

123. “Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There’s no need to examine just how events fit in.”

— James Hillman

124. “It’s very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: “Now we’re going to hear the opposing view.” There is never a third view.”

— James Hillman

125. “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.”

— James Hillman

126. “It’s very hard to know what wisdom is.”

— James Hillman

127. “We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.”

— James Hillman

128. “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.”

— James Hillman

129. “Teachers today can’t take to a child.”

— James Hillman

130. “To be sane, we must recognise our beliefs as fictions.”

— James Hillman

131. “Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework, and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible. – M. Merleau-Ponty, Working Notes.”

— James Hillman

132. “Jung says we must look at the intentionality of the characters and where they are heading, for they are the main influence upon the shape of the stories. Each carries his own plot with him, writing his story, both backwards and forwards, as he individuates. Jung gives far more weight to individual character than either to narrative or to plot. If.”

— James Hillman

133. “One of the goals of alchemists was to concoct the “elixir,” a panacea that would heal all ills and prolong all lives. This miraculous substance had many names, the most inclusive being lapis philosophorum, philosophers’ stone.”

— James Hillman

134. “More: as the cure depends on care, so does caring sometimes mean nothing more than carrying.”

— James Hillman

135. “My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced.”

— James Hillman

136. “In contemporary psychological language, efficiency is a primary mode of denial.”

— James Hillman

137. “There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.”

— James Hillman

138. “This sentence, “I love you,” parroted back and forth by child and parent may have a subtext that means many things, but it definitely does not mean love, for when you love someone you are filled with fantasies, ideas, and anxieties.”

— James Hillman

139. “For any one of us, child or adult, the question eclipsing all others is: How does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?”

— James Hillman

140. “Perception bestows blessing – as the stories sketched in this chapter attempt to demonstrate. Perception brings into being and maintains the being of whatever is perceived; and when perception sees in “the holiness of the Heart’s affections,” again as these stories say, things are revealed that prove the Truth of the Imagination.”

— James Hillman