Top 100 Starhawk Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Force, punishment, and violence are patriarchy’s answer to conflicts and social problems. Patriarchy finds its ultimate expression in war.”

— Starhawk

52. “If we are to reclaim our culture, we cannot afford narrow definitions.”

— Starhawk

53. “The terrain of the mysteries is the ordinary. To seek out mystery, we don’t have to go anywhere. We must simply change our preception, our description, our consciousness of where we are.”

— Starhawk

54. “To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up.”

— Starhawk

55. “Ritual affirms the common patterns, the values, the shared joys, risks, sorrows, and changes that bind a community together. Ritual links together our ancestors and descendants, those who went before with those will come after us.”

— Starhawk

56. “Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.”

— Starhawk

57. “Decide what is sacred to you, and put your best life energies at its service. Make that the focus of your studies, your work, the test for your pleasures and your relationships. Don’t ever let fear or craving for security turn you aside.” When you serve your passion, when you are willing to risk yourself for something, your greatest creative energies are released. Hard work is required, but nothing is more joyful.”

— Starhawk

58. “In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.”

— Starhawk

59. “To choose is also to begin.”

— Starhawk

60. “The Mysteries are teachings that cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, but only by the deep mind made accessible in trance. They may be conveyed by an object – a shaft of wheat, as in the Eleusinian Mysteries – by a key phrase, or symbol. The secret itself may be meaningless when out of context: only within the framework of the ritual does it take on its illuminating power.”

— Starhawk

61. “Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because words they are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually sound, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement.”

— Starhawk

62. “In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess – we connect with Her; through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves.”

— Starhawk

63. “To practice magic is to bear the responsibility for having a vision.”

— Starhawk

64. “His image is poemagogic: It both symbolizes and sparks the creative process, which is itself a Quest.”

— Starhawk

65. “A spell is a symbolic act done in an altered state of consciousness, in order to cause a desired change.”

— Starhawk

66. “The healing of our relationship with place begins with the preservation of the natural environment. We cannot go to the wild for renewal if no wilderness is left.”

— Starhawk

67. “Magic is the craft of shaping, the craft of the wise, exhilarating, dangerous – the ultimate adventure. The power of magic should not be underestimated. It works, often in ways that are unexpected and difficult to control.”

— Starhawk

68. “Beware of organizations that proclaim their devotion to the light without embracing, bowing to the dark; for when they idealize half the world they must devalue the rest.”

— Starhawk

69. “And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.”

— Starhawk

70. “Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different cycles within it.”

— Starhawk

71. “The Sabbats are the eight points at which we connect the inner and the outer cycles: the interstices where the seasonal, the celestial, the communal, the creative, and the personal all meet.”

— Starhawk

72. “Ritual and myth are like seed crystals of new patterns that can eventually reshape culture around them.”

— Starhawk

73. “When we cast a circle, we create an energy form, a boundary that limits and contains the movements of subtle forces.”

— Starhawk

74. “My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism. Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures.”

— Starhawk

75. “Finally we learn the Mystery – that unless we find the Goddess within ourselves we will never find Her without. She is both internal and external; as solid as a rock, as changeable as our own internal image of Her.”

— Starhawk

76. “In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control.”

— Starhawk

77. “The love of the Goddess is unconditional. She does not ask for sacrifice – whether human or animal – nor does She want us to sacrifice our normal human needs and desires. Witchcraft is a religion of self-celebration, not self-abnegation.”

— Starhawk

78. “Only poetry can address grief.”

— Starhawk

79. “Spirituality promotes passivity when the domain of spirit is defined as outside the world. When this world is the terrain of spirit, we ourselves become actors in the story, and this world becomes the realm in which the sacred must be honored and freedom created.”

— Starhawk

80. “Magic has always been an element of Witchcraft, but in the Craft its techniques were practiced within a context of community and connection.”

— Starhawk

81. “The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world. Manifest in each of us, She can be known internally by every individual, in all her magnificent diversity.”

— Starhawk

82. “This is how it works: Someone has a vision that arises from a fierce and passionate love. To make it real, we must love every moment of what we do. Impermanent spirals embed themselves in asphalt, concrete, dust. Slowly, slowly, they eat into the foundations of the structures of power. Deep transformations take time. Regeneration arises from decay. Si, se puede! It can be done.”

— Starhawk

83. “Fascination with the psychic – or the psychological – can be a dangerous sidetrack on any spiritual path.”

— Starhawk

84. “The Judeo-Christian heritage has left us with the view of a universe composed of warring opposites, which are valued as either good or evil. They cannot coexist.”

— Starhawk

85. “Witchcraft is fun. It offers us a chance to play, to act silly, to let the inner child come out. Out of foolishness and play, creativity is born.”

— Starhawk

86. “Each of us embodies the divine. Our ultimate spiritual authority is within, and we need no other person to interpret the sacred to us. We foster the questioning attitude, and we honor intellectual, spiritual, and creative freedom.”

— Starhawk

87. “The Crone, the Reaper... She is the Dark Moon, what you don’t see coming at you, what you don’t get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what’s scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth’s climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.”

— Starhawk

88. “If thoughts and emotions alone could cause things to happen, thousands of my contemporaries would have married the Beatles in 1964.”

— Starhawk

89. “The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.”

— Starhawk

90. “The Judeo-Christian heritage has left us with the view of a universe composed of warring opposites, which are valued as either good or evil. They cannot coexist. A valuable insight of Witchcraft, shared by many earth-based religions, is that polarities are in balance, not at war.”

— Starhawk

91. “If Goddess religion is not to become mindless idiocy, we must win clear of tendency of magic to become supertition. Magic – and among its branches I include psychology as its purpose to describe and change consciousness – is an art.”

— Starhawk

92. “The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.”

— Starhawk

93. “Without a vision human beings are nasty creatures.”

— Starhawk

94. “Witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology. The myths, legends, and teachings are recognized as metaphors for “That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told,” the absolute reality our limited minds can never completely know.”

— Starhawk

95. “There are many methods of trance induction, but all seem to function on one or more of four related principles: relaxation, sensory restriction, rhythm, and boredom.”

— Starhawk

96. “Creations, whether they are children, poems, or organizations, take on a life of their own.”

— Starhawk

97. “At its essence, the message of the Occupations is simply this: ‘Here in the face of power we will sit and create a new society, in which you do count.’”

— Starhawk

98. “Helping the terminally ill to consciously end their lives is a crime, while denying health care to the living is seen as sound fiscal practice.”

— Starhawk

99. “Despair breeds fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. A world of truly shared abundance would be a safer world.”

— Starhawk

100. “Any creative work that is truly alive is influenced by a thousand chance factors in its generation.”

— Starhawk