James Hillman Quotes

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?

If you keep examining your mind, you'll come to see that thoughts of who you are and how it all is are creating the reality you're experiencing.

The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.

How do you know, right now, that you are aware of being aware, or conscious?

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

You believe that you live in the world, where in fact the world lives within you.

Inward is not a direction. Inward is a dimension.

Consciousness is cerebral celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects--on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.

I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am - of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain - or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things ... I have no idea whatever of my soul.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

We use concepts like "consciousness"---"mind"---"personality," but we don't really know yet what these things are.' He was shaking his head. 'Not really. Not at all.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

The thing I call ‘my mind’ seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn’t really know its tenants.

it is in our minds that we live much of our life.