Top 60 Mary Pipher Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All feelings are acceptable, but all behavior isn’t.”

— Mary Pipher

2. “Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.”

— Mary Pipher

3. “How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, as long as the lightbulb wants to change.”

— Mary Pipher

4. “I think history is inextricably linked to identity. If you don’t know your history, if you don’t know your family, who are you?”

— Mary Pipher

5. “Telling stories never fails to produce good in the universe.”

— Mary Pipher

6. “Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it’s teeming with energy and fraught with danger.”

— Mary Pipher

7. “Real friends require honesty, openness, and even vulnerability. They also require attention and simple acts of kindness.”

— Mary Pipher

8. “I want to write. I have always wanted to write. I do not care it I am not good at it. I just want to try.”

— Mary Pipher

9. “People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America...”

— Mary Pipher

10. “True freedom has more to do with following the North Star than going whichever way the wind blows. Sometimes it seems like freedom is blowing with the winds of the day, but that kind of freedom is really an illusion. It turns your boat in circles. Freedom is sailing toward your dreams.”

— Mary Pipher

11. “All geniuses born women are lost to the public good.”

— Mary Pipher

12. “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.”

— Mary Pipher

13. “With meditation I found a ledge above the waterfall of my thoughts.”

— Mary Pipher

14. “I’m a perfectly good carrot that everyone is trying to turn into a rose. As a carrot, I have good color and a nice leafy top. When I’m carved into a rose, I turn brown and wither.”

— Mary Pipher

15. “Intelligent resistance keeps the true self alive.”

— Mary Pipher

16. “Part of what allows us to deeply appreciate our lives and savor our time is our past despair. In fact, it has great value as a springboard for growth. There is an ancient and almost universal cycle that involves trauma, despair, struggle, adaptation, and resolution. This is a deepening cycle that prepares us for whatever comes next. It opens our hearts to others and helps us feel grateful for every small pleasure.”

— Mary Pipher

17. “Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.”

— Mary Pipher

18. “Girls struggles with mixed messages: Be beautiful, but beauty is only skin deep. Be sexy, but not sexual. Be honest, but don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Be independent, but be nice. Be smart, but not so smart you threaten boys.”

— Mary Pipher

19. “Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn’t obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin.”

— Mary Pipher

20. “One important reason to stay calm is that calm parents hear more. Low-key, accepting parents are the ones whose children keep talking.”

— Mary Pipher

21. “The shorter we think our lives will be, the more likely we are to do things that are meaningful and give us pleasure. Awareness of death catapults us toward joy and reflection.”

— Mary Pipher

22. “Education is teaching children to find pleasure in the right things.”

— Mary Pipher

23. “The fullness of life comes from an identity built on giving and on joy.”

— Mary Pipher

24. “In family relationships, we may be the caretakers and comforters, but our friends take care of us. The richness and joy of these relationships cannot be described in words. We can define wealth for women our age in terms of our time with close women friends.”

— Mary Pipher

25. “Social change is a million individual acts of kindness; culture change is a million subversive acts of resistance.”

— Mary Pipher

26. “We tend to value military heroes and Schwarzenegger types who are physically courageous. The heroics of doing the right thing every day even when it is dull and inconvenient are undervalued.”

— Mary Pipher

27. “The two most radical things you can do in America are to slow down, and to talk to each other. If you do these things, you will improve your country.”

— Mary Pipher

28. “Everything is process and in process. We can hold on to nothing.”

— Mary Pipher

29. “Traditionally parents have wondered what their teens were doing, but now teens are much more likely to be doing things that can get them killed.”

— Mary Pipher

30. “Even now, after overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, we are still discussing the issue as if it were a belief, not a fact.”

— Mary Pipher

31. “I felt what I often feel, a deep respect for the courage of ordinary people – the people that get up every morning and do what needs to be done.”

— Mary Pipher

32. “When one of us tells the truth, he makes it easier for all of us to open our hearts to our pain and that of others.”

— Mary Pipher

33. “We don’t see the world as it is, but rather as we are. If we are angry and bitter, we find proof of hostility wherever we look. If we are trusting, we look for evidence of kindness.”

— Mary Pipher

34. “In all the years I’ve been a therapist, I’ve yet to meet one girl who likes her body.”

— Mary Pipher

35. “Gratitude is a life skill that can be improved with practice. Even during the toughest trials, we can learn to find things to enjoy and appreciate. I don’t mean to imply that we can manage to be grateful every moment. That would be an unrealistic demand on ourselves. Feeling grateful is not a moral injunction but rather a healthy habit that we can learn to employ with grater frequency.”

— Mary Pipher

36. “The protected place in space and time that we once called childhood has grown shorter.”

— Mary Pipher

37. “I teach girls certain skills. The first and most basic is centering. I recommend that they find a quiet place where they can sit alone daily for 10 to 15 minutes. I encourage them to sit in this place, relax their muscles and breathe deeply. Then they are to focus on their own thoughts and feelings about the day. They are not to judge these thoughts or feelings or even direct them, only to observe them and respect them. They have much to learn from their own internal reactions to their lives.”

— Mary Pipher

38. “Being fat means being left out, scorned, and vilified.”

— Mary Pipher

39. “Our media outlets pay attention to the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but not to species extinction rates. In this country money is well organized, but survival is not.”

— Mary Pipher

40. “Girls know they are losing themselves... Girls become fragmented, their selves split into mysterious contradictions. They are sensitive and tenderhearted, mean and competitive, superficial and idealistic. They are confident in the morning and overwhelmed with anxiety by nightfall. They rush through their days with wild energy and then collapse into lethargy,. They try on new roles every week: this week the good student, next week the delinquent and the next, the artist.”

— Mary Pipher

41. “Acceptance is the end of our argument with reality. Once we face the facts, no matter how disturbing they are, we feel calmer and less crazy. Erik Erikson defined clarity as “the capacity to fear accurately.”

— Mary Pipher

42. “Of course, ultimately ageism is a prejudice against one’s own future self.”

— Mary Pipher

43. “Happiness comes from making good choices. Integrity, energy, perseverance, and courage all contribute. In short, happiness is related to character structure, work, health and relationships.”

— Mary Pipher

44. “How much of my time should I spend doing things that are good for me? And how much time should I save to do things that are important to me?”

— Mary Pipher

45. “You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.” – Eleanor Roosevelt.”

— Mary Pipher

46. “Finally I teach the joys of altruism. Many adolescent girls are self-absorbed. It’s not a character flaw, it’s a developmental stage. Nonetheless, in makes them unhappy and limits their understanding of the world. I encourage girls to find some ways to help people on a regular basis.”

— Mary Pipher

47. “We can deal with our cultural and environmental crises only after we deal with our human crises of trauma, denial, and emotional paralysis. This will require that most difficult of all human endeavors, facing our own despair. This involves waking from our trance of denial, facing our own pain and sorrow, accepting the world as it is, adapting, and living more intentionally.”

— Mary Pipher

48. “If you want to know the time, ask a dog. They always know, and they’ll tell you the correct time, which is now, now, now.”

— Mary Pipher

49. “As I grow older, I try not to focus on my regrets and failures, but rather to focus on what I’ve accomplished.”

— Mary Pipher

50. “I do believe our culture is doing a bad job raising boys. The evidence is in the shocking violence of Paducah, Jonesboro, Cheyenne, and Edinboro. It’s in our overcrowded prisons and domestic violence shelters. It’s in our Ritalin-controlled elementary schools and alcohol-soaked college campuses.”

— Mary Pipher