248 Quotes by James Hillman

Why do I prefer insurance to the invisible guarantees of existence?

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.

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.

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

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.

Sometimes we act in order not to see.

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.

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

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.