James Hillman Soul Quotations

Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.

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

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

Pathology is not a problem to be solved, but the soul's way of working on itself.

We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.

The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul.

Loss means losing what was We want to change but we don't want to lose. Without time for loss, we don't have time for soul

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.

Psychology is ultimately mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.

Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.

As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.

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.

Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character.

How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount.