Quotes by James Hillman

If, as Nalungiaq says, "in the very earliest time... people and animals... spoke the same language," then the rectification of language requires closeness with our animal nature. Then the vitality of our language resides as much in the sound of our words and beat of their rhythms as in their meanings. That's why Lorca puts the poetry of duende together with song, dance, and bull-fighting, and that's why poems belong more to speaking than to reading, more to passionate declamation and ecstatic jubilation, keening, crying, and screaming, and to the secret whispers of lovers' lips than to typed lines on bleached paper. Good language asks to be spoken aloud, mind to mind and heart to heart, by embodied voices that still retain the animal and by tongues that still delight in savoring vowels and the clipped splitting of explosive consonants.

Moments come when we feel outside time, seized by a longing, moved by an image, in touch with invisible voices. We realize that we do not live in one world only. As Rilke says, "we are grasped by what we cannot grasp..." Something beyond life lives within life and calls the soul... Repair of the soul ("the damage I have done to myself," as Kabir says) and focus on the job at hand are only half; a man has metaphysical tasks, too. Unless his spirit ventures toward the invisible, a man will be unable to perform the daily round with purpose. He will have little joy, only duty--and rebelliousness. The deepest cause of our discontent and our confused yearnings is the loss of Paradise. The human soul needs anchoring in something beyond itself, in that vision which is the ground of all initiations, a vision which hints that life on earth reflects ideals of perfection.

Besides the fact that its {Human Potential Movement Psychology} notion of growth is simplistic, of nature romantic, and love, innocent - for it presents growth without decay, nature without catastrophes or inert stupidity, and love without possession - besides all this, its idea of the psyche is naïve if not delusional. For where is sin, and where are viciousness, failure, and the crippling vicissitudes that fate brings through pathologizing? When we turn to its literature we find scarce mention of such saturnine and sobering ideas as necessity, limitation, ancestry, or fundamental lacks or wants - the basic lacunae of each personality.It is out of touch with the stoic, tragic view of existential, irrational, pathological man.

The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel “blest by everything.”

Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. […]

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?

It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person’s fate. Translators use “plot” to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.

Without time for loss you don't have time for soul.

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.

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.