248 Quotes by James Hillman

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.

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.

Teachers today can’t take to a child.

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.

Psychology ideally means giving soul to language and finding language for soul.

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.

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.

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.

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.