Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Quote by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Work

Women Who Run With the Wolves

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Clarissa Pinkola Estés. more

You May Also Like

“That was Edie. Always dramatic, always dreaming of faraway places and adventure. Yet she never left the safety of her fortress except to go into town on errands or her weekly poker game with the elderly Mr. Henderson. She was, simultaneously, perfectly content and terribly dissatisfied. Nearly impossible to read but wonderful to watch. Insecure yet comfortable in her own skin.”

DreamerAunt EdieCharacter Descriptions
Book:Voyage of the Sandpiper
Create image

“Like a great waterwheel, the liturgical year goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime. So goes the liturgical year through all the days of our lives. /it concentrates us on the two great poles of the faith - the birth and death of Jesus of Nazareth. But as Christmas and Easter trace the life of Jesus for us from beginning to end, the liturgical year does even more: it also challenges our own life and vision and sense of meaning. Both a guide to greater spiritual maturity and a path to a deepened spiritual life, the liturgical year leads us through all the great questions of faith as it goes. It rehearses the dimensions of life over and over for us all the years of our days. It leads us back again and again to reflect on the great moments of the life of Jesus and so to apply them to our own ... As the liturgical year goes on every day of our lives, every season of every year, tracing the steps of Jesus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, so does our own life move back and forth between our own beginnings and endings, between our own struggles and triumphs, between the rush of acclamation and the crush of abandonment. It is the link between Jesus and me, between this life and the next, between me and the world around me, that is the gift of the liturgical year. The meaning and message of the liturgical year is the bedrock on which we strike our own life's direction. Rooted in the Resurrection promise of the liturgical year, whatever the weight of our own pressures, we maintain the course. We trust in the future we cannot see and do only know because we have celebrated the death and resurrection of Jesus year after year. In His life we rest our own. ― Joan D. Chittister, The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life - The Ancient Practices Series”

JesusChurchResurrectionEasterLiturgyBenedictine
Book:The Liturgical Year
Create image

“The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity! This seems a very daring comparison. I apologise for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched a keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame. But alas! We take the psychiatrists' word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They may all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light—they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?”

ChristianReligionPrayerChristianityCatholicCatholicismMonksBenedictineTrappistCarthusian
Book:The Diary of a Country Priest
Create image

“It was a music of the spirit, seeking peace, not emotional release, expressing the hunger of the soul rather than the heart. A way of sequencing notes so ancient it might be music's mother lode, its Fertile Crescent. It wouldn't have grated, I felt, on the ears of ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Mesopotamians or Sumerians—or even on the august auditory equipment of the Buddha or Lao-tzu.”

ReligionPeaceMusicChristianityCatholicAncientCatholicismBenedictineGregorian Chant
Book:Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
Create image

“It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is a bit like a monk. They both take a rather dim view of the world, and both try to do something about it." "Thank you, Father Joe! I think I knew that once, but I'd forgotten. Contemptus mundi. We both have contempt for the world." "You p-p-persist in your error, my son. Contemptus does not mean 'contempt.' It means 'detachment.' Are you detached from the things you satirize?”

WorldChristianReligionReligiousChristianityCatholicLatinCatholicismMonkDetachmentBenedictineContemptus Mundi
Book:Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
Create image