110+ Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes On Creativity, Mystic And Inspiring

Clarissa Pinkola Estes is an American poet, post-trauma specialist, and cantadora storyteller of Mexican heritage. She is best known for her best-selling book Women Who Run with the Wolves, which explores the instinctual nature of women. Estes has written numerous other books, including The Faithful Gardener and The Creative Fire, and has published collections of her poetry. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Clarissa Pinkola Estes on creativity, mystic, inspiring.

Top 10 Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes

1. If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith. There is yet time.
2. 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.
3. Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.
4. 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.
5. A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.
6. Be proud of your scars. They have everything to do with your strength, and what you've endured. They're a treasure map to the deep self.
7. My brain has no heart, and my heart has no brain. That's why when I speak my mind, I appear heartless and when I do what's in my heart I seem thoughtless.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. If you have ever been called defiant, incorrigible, forward, cunning, insurgent, unruly, rebellious, you're on the right track.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes Short Quotes

• The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.
• Be wild; that is how to clear the river.
• I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you.
• This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.
• Since time out of mind, a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence.
• Asking the proper question is the central act of transformation!
• Just because a woman is silent does not mean she agrees.
• God forgives us. ... Who am I not to forgive?
• we wish to make rage into a fire that cooks things rather than a fire of conflagration.
• Stories are medicine.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes About Creativity

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

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

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

Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes About Lost

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

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

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

Clarissa Pinkola Estes Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

Three things differentiate living from the soul verses living from the ego only: the ability to sense and learn new ways, the tenacity to ride a rough road, and the patience to learn deep love over time. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

It's not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

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

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

The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. . . . It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirits, the pit at the center, and rising hope. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says, 'Nothing good came of this' is not yet listening. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

We practice conscious forgetting by refusing to summon up the fiery material, we refuse to recollect. To forget is an active, not a passive, endeavor. It means to not haul up certain materials, or turn them over and over, to not work oneself up by repetitive thought, picture, or emotion. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to move the east to west, to act crazy or out of control. It does not mean to lose one's primary socializations, or to become less human. It means quite the opposite. The wild nature has a vast integrity to it — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

...stories that rise from deep suffering can provide the most potent remedies for past, present, and even future ills. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When you feel bad, find a person to talk to and cry with, to tell of your anger and other helpless feelings. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

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

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

When you focus with soul eyes, / You will see home in many, many places. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The soul has no gender. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. 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

If logic was anything, all men would ride sidesaddles. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Mend the part of the world that is within your reach. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

I have to go to the woods, and I have to meet the wolf, or else my life will never begin. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Latina women are proud to be called Mrs. That simply means that we have a family. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Nurture is like psychic Wheaties. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

In this tradition a story is 'holy,' and it is used as medicine," she told Radiance magazine. "The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or missing and to bring it back to consciousness again. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Among wolves, no matter how sick, no matter how cornered, no matter how alone, afraid or weakened, the wolf will continue.She will lope even with a broken leg. She will strenuously outwait, outwit, outrun and outlast whatever is bedeviling her. She will put her all into taking breath after breath. The hallmark of the wild nature is that it goes on. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Failure is a greater teacher than success — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The deterioration of symbols is natural. They wear out, needing to be reclaimed, recreated; returned to the spirit. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

The deepest work is usually the darkest. A brave woman, a wisening woman, will developing the poorest psychic land, for if she builds only on the best land of her psyche, she will have for a view the least of what she is. So do not be afraid of the worst. It only guarantees increase of soul power through fresh insights and opportunities for re-visioning one's life and self anew. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I am built close to the ground and of extravagant body. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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

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

All the "not readies," all the "I need time," are understandable, but only for a short while. The truth is that there is never a "completely ready," there is never a really "right time." As with any descent to the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one's nose, and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would not have needed to create the words heroine, hero, or courage. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

Story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Forgiveness is an act of creation. You can choose from many ways to do it. You can forgive for now, forgive till then, forgive till the next time, forgive but give no more chances it’s a whole new game if there is another incident. You can give one more chance, give several more chances, give many chances, give chances only if. You can forgive part, all, or half of the offense. You can devise a blanket of forgiveness. You decide — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

Life Lessons by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

1. Clarissa Pinkola Estes teaches us to embrace our wildness and to trust our intuition as a source of wisdom and strength.
2. She encourages us to be brave and to explore our inner depths, to find our own unique voice and to use it to share our stories with the world.
3. She reminds us that we are all connected and that we have the power to create a more compassionate, understanding, and just world.