The Soul's Code Quotes

“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Despite this invisible caring, we prefer to imagine ourselves thrown naked into the world, utterly vulnerable and fundamentally alone. It is easier to accept the story of heroic self-made development than the story that you may well be loved by this guiding providence, that you are needed for what you bring, and that you are sometimes fortuitously helped by it in situations of distress. May I state this as a bare and familiar fact without quoting a guru, witnessing for Christ, or claiming the miracle of recovery? Why not keep within psychology proper what once was called providence—being invisibly watched and watched over?”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Because the “traumatic” view of early years so controls psychological theory of personality and its development, the focus of our rememberings and the language of our personal story telling have already been infiltrated by the toxins of these theories. Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods. We are, this book shall maintain, less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“All tall trees are wise, according to the West African teacher Malidoma Somé, because their movement is imperceptible, the connection between above and below so firm, their physical presence so generously useful.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Why do I prefer insurance to the invisible guarantees of existence?”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this "something" as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“For any one of us, child or adult, the question eclipsing all others is: How does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework, and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible. —M. Merleau-Ponty, Working Notes”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“So it is customary to see in a mother’s ideals and intensity of ambition what is carried out by one or another of her children. According to biographers, the source of success appears to lie in a mother’s doting—or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Perception bestows blessing—as the stories sketched in this chapter attempt to demonstrate. Perception brings into being and maintains the being of whatever is perceived; and when perception sees in “the holiness of the Heart’s affections,” again as these stories say, things are revealed that prove the Truth of the Imagination.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own… potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things, more infotainment.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“What determines eminence is less a call to greatness than the call of character, that inability to be other than what you are in acorn, following it faithfully or being desperately driven by its dream.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“For centuries we have searched for the right term for this "call". The Romans named it your 'genius'; the Greeks, your 'daimon'; and the Christians your guardian angel. The Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart, and Michelangelo's intuitive eye saw an image in the heart of the person he was sculpting. The Neoplatonists referred to an imaginal body, the 'ochema', that carried you like a vehicle. It was your personal bearer or support. For some it is Lady Luck or Fortuna; for others a genie or jinn, a bad seed or evil genius. In Egypt, it might have been the 'ka', or the 'ba' with whom you could converse. Among the people we refer to as Eskimos and others who follow shamanistic practices, it is your spirit, your free-soul, your animal-soul, your breath-soul.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“If life has a base that it stands upon … then my [life] without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery of St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves … breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing … and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here … —Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods. We are, this book shall maintain, less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Words are like pillows: if put correctly they ease pain”
― James Hillman, Souls Code by Hillman, James published by Bantam (1997) [Paperback]

“Simply stated, the theory says the roots of later superiorities are buried in early inferiorities. Short, sickly, and sad children are driven by the principle of compensation to develop into towering leaders of activity and strength.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“A primordial loveliness resides in the etymological acorn; it dances with life and is full of projections; and it is as sensitive as the tip of the penis.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“But our task here is not to restore all the invisibles but to discriminate among them by attending to the one that once was called your daimon or genius, sometimes your soul or your fate, and now your acorn.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“The only possible mediocre soul would have to be one without marks of any kind, utterly innocent, imageless and therefore unimaginable, and also damned to an existence without a daimon.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Huddled there in the mean, we look with envy and fear at the exceptional few pushing out the edges.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Perhaps innocence is a greater mystery than evil.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Crooks and criminals, sadistic guards and serial rapists—all the creatures large and small of the underworld—did their souls descend from the lap of Necessity? Again, Plotinus asked the question centuries ago: “How could a wicked character be given by the Gods?”1 Can one be called to murder? Can the acorn harbor a bad seed? Or, perhaps the criminal psychopath has no soul at all?”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Yet all along a little elf whispers another tale: “You are different; you’re not like anyone in the family; you don’t really belong.” There is an unbeliever in the heart. It calls the family a fantasy, a fallacy.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“Their union results from your necessity—and not the other way around.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling