Top 100 Clarissa Pinkola Quotes
#1. There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too, have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#2. Wild Woman teaches women when not to act "nice" about protecting their soulful lives.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#3. When a women speaks her truth, fires up her intention and feeling, stays tight with the instinctive nature, she is singing, she is living in the wild breath-stream of the soul.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#4. Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#5. Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#6. Suppose ... the body is a God in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? ... Are we strong enough to refute the party line and listen deep, listen true to the body as a powerful and holy being?
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#8. To take the world into one's arms and act towards it in a soul-filled and soul-strengthening manner is a powerful act of wildish spirit.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#9. It's not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#10. When seeking guidance, don't ever listen to the tiny-hearted. Be kind to them, heap them with blessing, cajole them, but do not follow their advice.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#11. When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#12. I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#16. Artfulness is not simple entertainment,
especially during upheaval,
unleashing creative life is sacred duty.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#17. Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags and crazy people.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#18. As long as a woman is forced into believing she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#19. Many of us have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#20. She must be willing to feel anxious sometimes, otherwise she might as well have stayed in the nest. Sometimes
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#21. As a woman lives them, she will understand more and more of these interior feminine rhythms, among them the rhythms of creativity, or birthing psychic babies and perhaps also human ones, the rhythms of solitude, of play, of rest, of sexuality, and of the hunt.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#22. The things that women reclaim are often their own voice, their own values, their imagination, their clairvoyance, their stories, their ancient memories. If we go for the deeper, and the darker, and the less known we will touch the bones.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#23. Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity, can cause to be set in motion ... Mend the part of the world that is within your reach.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#25. The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#26. That sort of overintellectualization obscures the patterns of the Wild Woman and the instinctual nature of women.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#27. It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#28. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#30. Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#31. We wish to make rage into a fire that cooks things rather than a fire of conflagration.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#32. Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul's journey. Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one's own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us. As
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#33. The point of art is not simply to express ourselves, but to create an external, concrete form in which the soul of our lives can be evoked and contained.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#34. A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look 'cleaned up and combed' on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#35. If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman ... have faith. There is yet time.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#36. For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#37. I'll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is the door; if you have an old, old story, that is the door.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#38. Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#39. Practice listening to your intuition, your inner voice; ask questions; be curious; see what you see; hear what you hear; and then act upon what you know to be true. These intuitive powers were given to your soul at birth.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#40. If women were in charge of everything, there would be women tyrants. If black people were in charge, there would be black tyrants. If Hispanics were in charge, then Hispanic tyrants.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#41. I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write ... and you know it's a funny thing about house cleaning ... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#43. If you have yet to be called an incorrigable, defiant woman,
don't worry, there is still time
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#46. With the wild nature as ally and teacher we see not through two eyes but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes. The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#47. The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort.If you take out of the closet and put in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#48. Sometimes there are no words to help one's courage. Sometimes you just have to jump.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#49. Sometimes a woman is afraid to be without security or without certainty, for even a short time. She has more excuses than dogs have hairs. She must just simply dive in and stand not knowing what will happen next.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#50. Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered ...
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#51. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#52. Story cannot be "studied." It is learned through assimilation, through living in its proximity with those who know it, live it, and teach it - more so through all the day-to-day mundane tasks of life, much more than the clearly ceremonial times. The
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#53. We say it is the nature of the thing.Yet we find this destructive process exacerbated when the culture surrounding a women touts , nourishes, and protects destructive attitudes towards the deep instinctual and soulful nature.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#54. Ritual is one of the ways in which humans put their lives in perspective, whether it be Purim, Advent, or drawing down the moon. Ritual calls together the shades and specters in people's lives, sorts them out, puts them to rest.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#56. Remember, if logic were all there really was to the world, then surely all men would ride sidesaddle
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#57. We all wish to be brave and strong in the face of disaster. We all wish to be looked up to for our endurance and efforts to help others.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#58. Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#59. This wolf-woman Self must have freedom to move, to speak, to be angry, and to create.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#61. Wild Women: "They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#62. Since time out of mind, a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#63. When a creature is exposed to violence, it will tend to adapt to that disturbance, so that when the violence ceases or the creature is allowed its freedom, the healthy instinct to flee is hugely diminished, and the creature stays put instead.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#64. If you've lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#65. The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#66. The quintessential feminine Self stands at the center of the psyche and it is wild, meaning natural and free, and utterly wise. It is not 'something' we must strive to create. This Self is already fully present, burning strong and waiting for us to come into its presence.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#67. We can see that for the deep work to continue, trying to prove one's worth to the chorus of jealous hags is pointless.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#68. The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#69. Whether you are possessed of a simple heart or the ambitions of an Amazon, whether you are trying to make it to the top or just make it through tomorrow, whether you be spicy or somber, regal or roughshod - the Wild Woman belongs to you. She belongs to all women. To
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#71. Unfurl the bandages, ready the medicine. Let us return now, wild women howling, laughing, singing up The One who loves us.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#72. Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air; they run in circles, they plow up the ground with their noses ...
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#73. The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#74. Do not lose heart. We were made for these times ... For years we have been learning, practicing, been in training for ... and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#75. When the personal soul life is burnt to ashes, a woman loses the vital treasure and begins to get dry boned as Death. In her unconscious, the desire for the red shoes, a wild joy, not only continues, it swells and floods, and eventually staggers to its feet and takes over, ferocious and famished.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#76. To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#77. When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#78. While I do not in any way mean to say that a woman should throw herself into a torturous or abusive situation, I do mean she must set for herself something in life that she is willing to reach for and therefore take risks for.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#79. Tears are a river that takes you somewhere ... Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#80. I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#83. I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories ... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#84. The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#85. We know the soul-spirit can be injured, even maimed, but it is very nearly impossible to kill. You can dent the soul and bend it. You can hurt it and scar it. You can leave the marks of illness upon it, and scorch marks of fear. But it does not die, for it protected by La Loba...
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#86. Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer ... and on the reader.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#87. This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#88. Being real doesn't mean being reckless, it means allowing La Voz Mitologica, The Mythological Voice, to speak. One does that by shutting off the ego for a while and letting that which wishes to speak, speak.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#89. So, let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#91. Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#93. Like all other lonely or hungry things, ego loves the light. It sees light, and the possibility of being close to the soul, and it creeps up to it and steals one of its essential camouflages. In a hunger for soul, our own ego-self steals the pelt
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#94. There is an integrity to story that comes from a real life lived in it. A story is clearly illumined from being raised up in it. In
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#95. Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#96. Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#97. Our own sorrows seem heavy enough, even when lifted by certain long-term joys. But watching others hurt is the breaker of most any heart.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#98. I have to go to the woods, and I have to meet the wolf, or else my life will never begin.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#99. It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#100. The body is like the earth ... as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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