Clarissa Pinkola Estes famous quotes

How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to say about it all.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Forgiveness #Sorry #Sorrow

All strong souls first go to hell before they do the healing of the world they came here for. If we are lucky, we return to help those still trapped below.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Strong #Healing #Soul

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

#Doubt #Safe #Ships

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

#Want #Causes #Self Discovery

Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Believe #Soul #Solitude

When a woman is exhorted to be compliant, cooperative, and quiet, to not make upset or go against the old guard, she is pressed into living a most unnatural life- a life that is self-blinding.. . without innovation. The world-wide issue for women is that under such conditions they are not only silenced, they are put to sleep. Their concerns, their viewpoints, their own truths are vaporized.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Sleep #Self #Issues

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

#Woods

If you have yet to be called an incorrigable, defiant woman, don't worry, there is still time
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Time #Women #Worry

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

#Rocks #Ideas #Focus

Be wild; that is how to clear the river.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Rivers #Clear

Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Love You #Creative #World

In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Children #Heart #Dark

The way to maintain one's connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Differences #Soul #Important

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

#Understanding #Wilderness #Disappear

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

#Crazy #People #Community

When we accept our own wild beauty, it is put into perspective, and we are no longer poignantly aware of it anymore, but neither would we forsake it or disclaim it either. Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she leaps? Does a feline know what beautiful shapes she makes when she sits? Is a bird awed by the sound it hears when it snaps open its wings? Learning from them, we just act in our own true way and do not draw back from or hide our natural beauty. Like the creatures, we just are, and it is right.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Beautiful #Wings #Perspective

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Powerful #Dark #Fire

To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one's own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one's own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Strength #Strong #Mean

The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Doors #Self #Sky

If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith. There is yet time.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Have Faith #Impossible #Incorrigible

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

#Art #Soul #Form

A lover cannot be chosen a la smorgasbord. A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving. To choose just because something mouthwatering stands before ou will never satisfy the hunger of the soul-self. And that is what the intuition is for; it is the direct messenger of the soul.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Self #Soul #Intuition

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

#Believe #Long #Feminine

To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Hero #Littles #Pleasure

It is that holy poetry and singing we are after. ... It is the wild singing we are after, our chance to use the wild language we are learning by heart under the sea. When a woman speaks her truth, fires up her intention and feeling, staying tight with the instinctive nature, she is singing, she is living in the wild breath-stream of the soul. To live this way is a cycle in itself, one meant to go on, go on, go on.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Heart #Fire #Sea

Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Keys #Swings #Doors

Do not cringe and make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf. Those with slow seeing say that a noncomformist is a blight on society. But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, that one is practically guaranteed to make an original contribution, a useful and stunning contribution to her culture.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Mean #Healing #Sheep

The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Dream #Passion #Language

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer world.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Visionaries #Oracles #World

What is that which can never die It is that faithful force that is born into us that one that is greater than us that calls new seed to the open and battered and barren places so that we can be resown. It is this force in its insistence in its loyalty to us in its love of us in its most often mysterious ways that is far greater far more majestic and far more ancient than any heretofore ever known.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Loyalty #Faithful #Way

To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Mean #Embrace #Love Means

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Happiness #Graduation #Hope

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

#Running #Psych #Creating

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

#Healthy #Violence #Instinct

A runner is real when she takes the first step.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Running #Real #Firsts

Asking the proper questions is the central action of transformation. Questions are the key that causes the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Keys #Swings #Doors

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

#Powerful #Creativity #Knowing

Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Medicine #Needs #Stories

When women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghostly from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her, we know she belongs to us and we to her.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Memories #Names #Culture

It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What's needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take 'everyone on Earth' to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Giving Up #Justice #Groups

I call her Wild Woman, for those very words, wild and woman, create llamar o tocar a la puerta, the fairy-tale knock at the door of the deep feminine psyche. Llamar o tocar a la puerta means literally to play upon the instrument of the name in order to open a door. It means using words that summon up the opening of a passageway. No matter by which culture a woman is influenced, she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Mean #Doors #Order

we all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough; we begin a dialogue with thoughts and feelings that both tickle and thunder within us. We respond before we know how to speak the language, before we know all the answers, and before we know exactly to whom we are speaking.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Strong #Feelings #Answers

To be poor and be without trees, is to be the most starved human being in the world. To be poor and have trees, is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Tree #World #Way

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

#Teacher #Strong #Powerful

Tell the truth about your wound, and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don't pack whatever is easiest or most available into the emptiness. Hold out for the right medicine. You will recognize it because it makes your life stronger rather than weaker.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Medicine #Stronger #Emptiness

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

#Self #Ideas #Generosity

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this_world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Soul #World #Fixing

We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Night #Hair #Long

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

#Business #Compassion #Tasks

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Powerful #Struggle #Light

Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Art #Moments #Stolen

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

#Cutting #Hands #Touching

Artfulness is not simple entertainment, especially during upheaval, unleashing creative life is sacred duty.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Simple #Creative #Upheaval

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

#Real #Hands #Soul

Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul. In ancient times, purposeful solitude was both palliative and preventative. It was used to heal fatigue and to prevent weariness. It was also used as an oracle, as a way of listening to the inner self to solicit advice and guidance otherwise impossible to hear in the din of daily life.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#Believe #Self #Advice