Top 90 Clarissa Pinkola Estés Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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 Estés

2. “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.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes for Women, Recovery Quotes, Healing Quotes, Survival Quotes, Hurt Quotes

3. “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 Estés

Featured in: Be Yourself Quotes, Positive Quotes for Women

4. “The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Featured in: Positive Quotes for Women, Strong Women Quotes

5. “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.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

6. “Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes for Women, You Are Amazing Quotes

7. “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 Estés

8. “If you have yet to be called an incorrigable, defiant woman, don’t worry, there is still time.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

9. “All that you are seeking is also seeking you. If you lie still, sit still, it will find you. It has been waiting for you a long time.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

10. “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 Estés

11. “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 Estés

12. “Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered...”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

13. “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 Estés

14. “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 Estés

15. “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 Estés

16. “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 Estés

17. “Failure is a greater teacher than success.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

18. “The soul has no gender.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

19. “Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

20. “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 Estés

Featured in: Strong Quotes

21. “Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything – we need only listen.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

22. “Be wild; that is how to clear the river.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

23. “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 Estés

24. “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 Estés

25. “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 Estés

26. “To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

27. “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 Estés

28. “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 Estés

29. “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 Estés

30. “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 Estés

31. “Stories are medicine.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

32. “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 Estés

33. “I have to go to the woods, and I have to meet the wolf, or else my life will never begin.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

34. “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 Estés

35. “A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Featured in: Strong Quotes

36. “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 Estés

Featured in: Strong Quotes

37. “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 Estés

38. “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 Estés

39. “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 Estés

40. “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 Estés

41. “I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

42. “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 Estés

43. “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 Estés

44. “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 Estés

Featured in: Strong Quotes

45. “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 Estés

46. “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 Estés

47. “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 Estés

48. “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 Estés

49. “Asking the proper question is the central act of transformation!”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

50. “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 Estés