Top 90 Clarissa Pinkola Estés Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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 Estés

52. “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 Estés

53. “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 Estés

54. “Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

55. “The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

56. “Mend the part of the world that is within your reach.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

57. “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 Estés

58. “Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

59. “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 Estés

60. “It’s not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

61. “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 Estés

62. “Any time I find medicine that’s helpful, I share it with everyone I know.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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 Estés

64. “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 Estés

65. “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 Estés

66. “The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

67. “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 Estés

68. “Story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

69. “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 Estés

70. “What must I give more death to today, in order to generate more life? What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so? What must die in me in order for me to love? What not-beauty do I fear? Of what use is the power of the not-beautiful to me today? What should die today? What should live? What life am I afraid to give birth to? If not now, when?”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

71. “At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

72. “Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

73. “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 Estés

74. “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 Estés

75. “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 Estés

76. “A runner is real when she takes the first step.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

77. “Since time out of mind, a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

78. “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 Estés

79. “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 Estés

80. “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 Estés

81. “When you feel bad, find a person to talk to and cry with, to tell of your anger and other helpless feelings.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

82. “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 Estés

83. “Just because a woman is silent does not mean she agrees.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

84. “I am built close to the ground and of extravagant body.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

85. “The deterioration of symbols is natural. They wear out, needing to be reclaimed, recreated; returned to the spirit.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

86. “Nurture is like psychic Wheaties.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

87. “This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

88. “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 Estés

89. “Dogs are the magicians of the universe.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

90. “I became married at a young age and had two daughters and divorced at 26. I had to go on welfare to make ends meet. I had no way to support myself.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

91. “Latina women are proud to be called Mrs. That simply means that we have a family.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

92. “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 Estés

93. “If logic was anything, all men would ride sidesaddles...”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés