Top 60 Marion Woodman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “At the very point of vulnerability is where the surrender takes place-that is where the god enters. The god comes through the wound.”

— Marion Woodman

2. “A life truly lived constantly burns away veils of illusion, burns away what is no longer relevant, gradually reveals our essence, until, at last, we are strong enough to stand in our naked truth.”

— Marion Woodman

3. “An addiction is anything we do to avoid hearing the messages that body and soul are trying to send us.”

— Marion Woodman

4. “This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.”

— Marion Woodman

5. “But if you travel far enough, one day you will recognize yourself coming down to meet yourself. And you will say – yes.”

— Marion Woodman

6. “Having a body that is like a musical instrument, open enough to be able to resonate, literally resonate with what is coming both from the inside and from the outside, so that one is able to surrender to powers greater than oneself.”

— Marion Woodman

7. “Instead of transcending ourselves, we must move into ourselves.”

— Marion Woodman

8. “We all experience ‘soul moments’ in life-when we see a magnificent sunrise, hear the call of the loon, see the wrinkles in our mother’s hands, or smell the sweetness of a baby. During these moments, our body, as well as our brain, resonates as we experience the glory of being a human being.”

— Marion Woodman

9. “It is our very fear of the future that distorts the now that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present.”

— Marion Woodman

10. “To strive for perfection is to kill love because perfection does not recognize humanity.”

— Marion Woodman

11. “The healing of ourselves as healers has to take place first. Bringing ourselves to wholeness, we become more sensitive to other people. In the change of consciousness that happens within us, we bring about change of consciousness in those around us and in the planet itself.”

— Marion Woodman

12. “There is no sense talking about “being true to yourself” until you are sure what voice you are being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voices of the unconscious.”

— Marion Woodman

13. “Once we get used to listening to our dreams, our whole body responds like a musical instrument.”

— Marion Woodman

14. “It takes great courage to break with one’s past history and stand alone.”

— Marion Woodman

15. “Most of us are dragged toward wholeness.”

— Marion Woodman

16. “A life that is truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual.”

— Marion Woodman

17. “The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or ’sweetness.”

— Marion Woodman

18. “The mystery of God touches us – or does not – in the smallest details: giving a strawberry, with love; receiving a touch, with love; sharing the snapdragon red of an autumn sunset, with love.”

— Marion Woodman

19. “There is no growth without real feeling. Children not loved for who they are do not learn how to love themselves. Their growth is an exercise in pleasing others, not in expanding through experience. As adults, they must learn to nurture their own lost child.”

— Marion Woodman

20. “It is amazing that our souls – our eternal essences, with all their hopes and dreams and visions of an eternal world – are contained within these temporal bodies. No wonder suffering is part of the human condition...”

— Marion Woodman

21. “Rage and bitterness do not foster femininity. They harden the heart and make the body sick.”

— Marion Woodman

22. “The more you work with your dreams and your unconscious, and honor it, the more you understand it and it understands you. When you develop a relationship with your psyche this way, you begin to carry that energy into life and your relationships.”

— Marion Woodman

23. “The harder we look at our aches and ailments, the more we will be startled by the painful truths they are trying to convey about our dangerously disembodied way of life.”

— Marion Woodman

24. “To love unconditionally requires no contracts, bargains or agreements.”

— Marion Woodman

25. “If we could allow the pace of our meetings to slow down to the pace of our hearts, we might find genuine understanding.”

— Marion Woodman

26. “Transition begins in forgiveness.”

— Marion Woodman

27. “Consciousness will not always solve the problem, but it may make the suffering meaningful.”

— Marion Woodman

28. “My soul is the bridge between spirit and body and, as such, is a uniter of opposites. Without soul at center, I would either transcend into spirit or become mired in matter.”

— Marion Woodman

29. “Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.”

— Marion Woodman

30. “Often the wisdom of the body Clarifies the despair of the spirit.”

— Marion Woodman

31. “The word ‘feminine,’ as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.”

— Marion Woodman

32. “Many people can listen to their cat more intelligently than they can listen to their own despised body. Because they attend to their pet in a cherishing way, it returns their love. Their body, however, may have to let out an earth-shattering scream in order to be heard at all.”

— Marion Woodman

33. “The images we eat are as important as the food we eat. Think of that in terms of television, and a lot of the movies we watch.”

— Marion Woodman

34. “Kundalini power, the symbol of raising the energy coiled at the base of the spine upward through the chakras, is called by Sri Chinmoy, ‘the power of the Supreme Goddess.’ Repressed or coiled in a circle, she can be poisonous both to the body and the psyche, but once risen and standing upright, she is beneficent. The power of the serpent, rightly understood, is one of the ways the Goddess overcomes duality.”

— Marion Woodman

35. “Recognizing the difference between power and love is difficult if we were raised in a home where power was disguised as love.”

— Marion Woodman

36. “Women are, by nature, disposed to relationship and connectedness; yet true relationship cannot be embraced until a woman as a deep sense of her at-one-ment. Without this essential independence from all roles and bonds, she is a potential victim for servitude.”

— Marion Woodman

37. “The healing of ourselves as healers has to take place first.”

— Marion Woodman

38. “William Blake says the body is ’that portion of soul discerned by the five senses.”

— Marion Woodman

39. “What analysis is all about is for one hour a week, you sit and hope that for a flash of a moment you will experience connectedness.”

— Marion Woodman

40. “To me, real love, the move from power to love, involves immense suffering. Any creative work comes from that level, where we share our sufferings, just the sheer suffering of being human. And that’s where the real love is.”

— Marion Woodman

41. “So long as she is obedient to a mother – actual or internal – who unconsciously wishes to annihilate her, she is in a state of possession by the witch; she will have to differentiate herself out from that witch in order to live her own life.”

— Marion Woodman

42. “Change means change. We may have all the insights, but if we do not incarnate them, they are all in vain.”

— Marion Woodman

43. “The body is like an elaborate metaphor. One may be able to taste and not swallow, like the anorexic, or to swallow and not integrate, like the bulimic or obese.”

— Marion Woodman

44. “Storytelling is at the heart of life. As a child, I was never bored because I could always get on with my story.”

— Marion Woodman

45. “Only by discovering and loving the goddess lost within our rejected body can we hear our own authentic voice.”

— Marion Woodman

46. “When the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.”

— Marion Woodman

47. “She dreams she is in a glass coffin. From her prison, details have beauty. In her aloneness, she imagines emotions. Her husband is the perfect bridegroom, the trickster, the small boy looking for mother. She is goddess and mirror, siren and friend, femme fatale and sacrificing wife. He is attracted to her girlhood purity, her desire to sacrifice, to serve. At first he may be flattered: she sees him as a god.”

— Marion Woodman

48. “The Goddess is the unspeakable wisdom that grows into the very cells of the body. She lives with this sacramental truth at her center: the beauty and the horror of the whole of life are blazing in Her love. She is dancing in the flames.”

— Marion Woodman

49. “In the absence of role models for the new feminine in our culture, the Goddess speaks through dreams and creative imagination, giving guidance to those who chose to listen.”

— Marion Woodman

50. “When Matisse was asked whether he believed in God, his response was, ‘yes, when I’m working’.”

— Marion Woodman