JAMES HILLMAN

– At least we have souls, but no one says we are souls.

– The instincts are mythical beings, suberb in their indefiniteness.

– Truth is always in poetic form; not literal but symbolic. The alternative to literalism is mistery.

– The soul can exist without its therapists but not without its afflictions.

– Soul is distinct from body because soul may not be identified with any literal presentation or perspective.

– The soul of our civilization depends upon the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture calls for a culture of the imagination.

– Emotion is a gift that comes by surprise, a mythic statment rather than a human property.

– The world and the gods are dead or alive according to the condition of our souls.

– Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us.

– Dreams are important to the soul; what does seem to matter to the soul is the nightly encounter with a plurality of shades in an underworld, as if dreams prepared for death, the freeing of the soul from its identty with the ego and the waking state.

– What we learn from dreams is what psychic nature really is – the nature of psychic reality: not I, but we; not one, but many. Not monotheistic consciounsness looking down from its mountain, but polytheistic consciousness wandering all over the place.

– The implicit connection between having ideas to see with and seeing ideas themselves suggests that the more ideas we have, the more we see, and the deeper ideas we have the deeper we see.

– Trusting our feelings means obeying our grandfather and grandmother more than the gods within ourselves: our reason and experience.

– Without speech we loose soul, and human being assumes the fantasy being of animals.

– Renaissence man is now called the shadow, or the id, or the natural, instinctive, creative darkside.

– To let the dephts rise without our systems of protection is what psychiatry calls psychosis: the images and voices and energies invading the emptied cities of reason which have been depersonified and demythologized and so have no containers to receive the divine influxes. The Gods become diseases.

E muito, muito, muito mais.