Quotes by James Hillman

Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies - the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding.

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.

"My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought that and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism)."