Marion Woodman Quotes

An addiction is anything we do to avoid hearing the messages that body and soul are trying to send us. ~ Marion Woodman

A life that is truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual. ~ Marion Woodman

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

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

A few individuals, a few of the great saints, certainly knew what femininity was about. In the old matriarchies there was no feminine consciousness, only unconscious mother. The "I", the ego with values and truths of its own was not operating. In the Celtic world they died for the Goddess but they had no ego that said, "Life is worth living." They were like the terrorists...who don't have the ego strength to say life is worth living so they willingly die for a cause. Feminine consciousness has been operative in some individuals, but not in a whole culture. Now I think we're starting to get free of the old matriarchy and free of the patriarchy. In other words, we are entering into conscious relationship with our mother and father complexes. As a planet we're moving toward maturity. We're trying to find out who we are when we're not possessed by those complexes. And we're fighting against time. ~ Marion Woodman

The connection between conscious and unconscious poses particular problems in the dancer because the body is the soul of action. ~ Marion Woodman

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

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

To strive for perfection is to kill love because perfection does not recognize humanity. ~ Marion Woodman

It takes great courage to break with one's past history and stand alone. ~ Marion Woodman

You think of yourself
light, fast, free
free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your 'perfect' body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You're a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit. You refused to eat in order to fly. ~ Marion Woodman

Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction. ~ Marion Woodman

Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you're left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both. ~ Marion Woodman

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

Why put them through the danger of the fire? And then, I heard, as though it spoke, the voice of the guardian-head: "Each piece must go through the fire. The cowl, the wings, the pneuma, the source, the flow. All must go the way that I have gone. Each may crack in the process, as I have cracked. But look, the crack has healed. I did not break. Without the fire, the piece is untested, unlived, raw. Each must go through the fire. ~ Marion Woodman

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

For the first time in history, men and women are seriously exploring the possibilities of relationships based on separateness rather than togetherness. Instead of clinging to Yahweh, to a rigid set of laws established by a jealous Father-God who will rant in fury if he is disobeyed, they are simply ignoring that ranting, walking away from it, and attempting to put their trust in the irrational. In other words, they are trying to live by the spirit. ~ Marion Woodman

Rage and bitterness do not foster femininity. They harden the heart and make the body sick. ~ Marion Woodman

William Blake says the body is 'that portion of soul discerned by the five senses ~ Marion Woodman

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

Instead of transcending ourselves, we must move into ourselves. ~ Marion Woodman

When Matisse was asked whether he believed in God, his response was, 'yes, when I'm working'. ~ Marion Woodman

Once we get used to listening to our dreams, our whole body responds like a musical instrument. ~ Marion Woodman

Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken. ~ Marion Woodman

But if you travel far enough, one day you will recognize yourself coming down to meet yourself. And you will say - yes. ~ Marion Woodman

Their [those with eating disorders'] task is to rescue themselves from a drive that is destroying them. Food embodies the false values that their own bodies refuse to assimilate, by which I mean that their bodies become edemic, bloated, allergic, or resort to vomiting the poison out. The unconscious body, and certainly the conscious body, will not tolerate the negative mother. ~ Marion Woodman

Soul, to me, means "embodied essence," when we experience ourselves and others in our full humanity - part animal, part divine. Healing comes through embodiment of the soul. The soul in matter is what I think the feminine side of God is all about ... The feminine soul is what grounds us; it loves and accepts us in our totality. ~ Marion Woodman

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

The solid line throughout was my trying to make space to fly and forever smashing my wings against the bars of the cage. Granted, the cage grew bigger and very big, but I was always beyond the collective in my soul and always cut back by the collective in my body. ~ Marion Woodman

Healing depends on listening with the inner ear - stopping the incessant blather, and listening. Fear keeps us chattering - fear that wells up from the past, fear of blurting out what we really fear, fear of future repercussions. 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

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

What a paradox is there: flying higher into heaven, at the same time being forced to work deeper into the hell of my addiction, the hell of my own unconscious body. ~ Marion Woodman

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

Storytelling is at the heart of life ... In finding our own story, we assemble all the parts of ourselves. Whatever kind of mess we have made of it, we can somehow see the totality of who we are and recognize how our blunderings are related. We can own what we did and value who we are, not because of the outcome but because of the soul story that propelled us. ~ Marion Woodman

This is the beginning of a road whose end is totally unknown and totally known. ~ Marion Woodman

The light of the sacred prostitute penetrates to the heart of this darkness ... she is the consecrated priestess, in the temple, spiritually receptive to the feminine power flowing through her from the Goddess, and at the same time joyously aware of the beauty and passion in her human body. ~ Marion Woodman

Most of us are dragged toward wholeness. ~ Marion Woodman

But even the longest day wears to sunset. ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

I look into Julie's face. Not just at it, but into it. Every pore, every freckle, every faint gossamer hair. And then the layers beneath them. The flesh and bones, the blood and brain, all the way down to the unknowable energy that swirls in her core, the life force, the soul, the fiery will that makes her more than meat, coursing through every cell and binding them together in millions to form her. Who is she, this girl? What is she? She is everything. Her body contains the history of life, remembered in chemicals. Her mind contains the history of the universe, remembered in pain, in joy and sadness, hate and hope and bad habits, every thought of God, past-present-future, remembered, felt, and hoped for all at once. ~ Isaac Marion

We lost this animal instinct that we used to have. We use a very low percentage of our instinct. ~ Marion Cotillard

If I'm a content creator, and I get recognition for my work, that's going to motivate me to spend even more time on my next production and make it even better. ~ Nick Woodman

The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding...Witches in the abstract were not hanged in Salem; but one by one were brought to the gallows...After you have studied their lives faithfully, a remarkable thing happens; you discover that if you really know the few, you are on your way to understanding the millions. By grasping the local, the parochial even, it is possible to make a beginning at understanding the universal. ~ Marion L. Starkey

It's a paradox to be an actress, living in the city, taking planes all the time, trying to find the right balance in this life, which is not so eco-friendly, and still try to respect the environment. ~ Marion Cotillard

I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. 'What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?' she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.
I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. 'Why must I do what is hardest?'
'Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?
'But, Matron, I can't dream of playing Bach ... I couldn't read music.
'No, Marion,' she said her gaze soft ... 'No, not Bach's 'Gloria'. Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you. ~ Abraham Verghese

torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous. ~ Charles Dickens

Here then was a deadlock. I wanted to get the most out of life, but the more I tried to grasp, the more I felt that I was ever outside, missing things. At that time I could not understand at all that my real purpose might be to learn to have no purposes. ~ Marion Milner

So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future. ~ Marion Coutts

You can see what man made from the seat of an automobile, but the best way to see what God made is from the back of a horse. ~ Charles Marion Russell

Georgian England was very radical; there were all these new revolutionary ideas, and I think women had more freedom than they did later on. ~ Marion Bailey

This is my greatest obstacle, the biggest of all the boulders littering my path. In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, it all collapses. ~ Isaac Marion

We are all 'right' if we are being truly ourselves ... that is the best we can be in each moment, until we learn more ... ~ Jay Woodman

The best which a man means to do is generally better than the best he does, and it is perhaps the best he is capable of doing ~ F. Marion Crawford

If there are rules, we're the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to. ~ Isaac Marion

Can you imagine a world without men? No crime and lots of happy fat women." --Attributed to both Marion Smith and Nicole Hollander ~ Amanda Barton

We don't have a farm-to-table food safety system. I keep saying this. It came as a big surprise to the FDA that tomatoes were being grown in the United States, sent to Mexico for packing, and then sent back. I mean, they had no idea that our food chain worked like this. ~ Marion Nestle

There is no excuse for being derogatory or dismissive about other's beliefs, paths, choices. Everyone is where they need to be at the right time to learn the right things for them and their personal journey through life. ~ Jay Woodman

WE WAIT in the rivers and the woods, in the sky and the cities and the sun, but we do not wait patiently. We have been patient too long. We have been told again and again that we can't win, that the best we can hope for is balance, but we will no longer accept this. We feel a new future building beneath us, the magma of possibility pressing against the earth. We are becoming a mountain. We will erupt. ~ Isaac Marion

Sometimes, when I look back over my life," said Hannah sadly, "I do not think of all the people who harmed me, but quite often of all the kindnesses and wish I could go back and say 'thank you' properly." She ~ Marion Chesney

I'll never approach a part in the same way again. Piaf taught me so much. In terms of my work, I think I'll enjoy it even more than before, because now I know that characters truly exist in their own right. I'll have a way to bring them even more intensely to life. ~ Marion Cotillard

Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality. ~ Iris Marion Young

The visible world was only an imperfect reflection of the Ideal, which the Philosopher sought to transcend. ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

Sometimes it's a struggle to live in the moment. ~ Isaac Marion

At a certain point, the services that you build around the hardware become more important than the hardware itself. ~ Nick Woodman

We are consciousness playing a game with itself to see how it feels. ~ Jay Woodman

It's elevating and humbling at the same time. Running along a beach at sunrise with no other footprints in the sand, you realize the vastness of creation, your own insignificant space in the plan, how tiny you really are, your own creatureliness and how much you owe to the supreme body, the God that brought all this beauty and harmony into being. ~ Marion Irvine

Mist lies over the river like the icy breath of winter angels. Darkness gathers round ... and it is beautiful.
Thank you for this life, this death, whatever it is you are
that makes us finally see. ~ Jay Woodman

Meltwater (from the book Blue Bridge)

Up here. A face
Loses its lines

I look to see
The colour of your eyes …
They have turned
To water.

I lean forward
To catch
The scent of your hair –
All I smell is heather.

I touch your hand
And all I feel is earth and stones.
There is nothing left
But the hillside's breast

Your flesh and bones
Have vanished. ~ Jay Woodman

Linda shares her packet of Custard Creams with me, and Marion says "Picking is hungry work" in her bunged up voice, and I say, "Yeah, it is, Marion," and Marion's really happy, and I wish her life could be easier than it's going to be. ~ David Mitchell

Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Savior at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along about noon and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Has your life gone on long after the thrill of living is gone? Are the dreams in which you're dying the best you've ever had? ~ Isaac Marion

I grew up with stories of people who start their own businesses and do really well. So I thought, 'OK, that's what you do.' I can thank my dad for that. ~ Nick Woodman

Every moment - something beautiful happens. ~ Jay Woodman

Other dancers weave through our lives, sometimes stirring our deep soul's fires. ~ Jay Woodman

Breathing is optional, but I need some air. ~ Isaac Marion

And yet ...
But what if ...
I want to do something impossible. Something astounding and unheard of. I want to scrub the moss off the Space Shuttle and fly Julie to the moon and colonise it, or float a capsized cruise ship to some distant island where no one will protest us, or just harness the magic that brings me into the brains of the Living and use it to bring Julie into mine, because it's warm in here, it's quiet and lovely, and in here we aren't an absurd juxtaposition, we are perfect. ~ Isaac Marion

Now, we have the Holy Ghost. Each one of us who is a member of the Church has had hands laid upon his head and has been given, as far as an ordinance can give it, the gift of the Holy Ghost. But, as I remember, when I was confirmed, the Holy Ghost was not directed to come to me; I was directed to "receive the Holy Ghost." If I receive the Holy Ghost and follow his guidance, I will be among those who are protected and carried through these troubled times. And so will you, and so will every other soul who lives under his direction. If ye are prepared, ye need not fear. ~ Marion G. Romney

I came to the conclusion then that "continual mindfulness" ... must mean, not a sergeantmajor-like drilling of thoughts, but a continual readiness to accept whatever came. ~ Marion Milner

I think that devices like Glass are going to do a terrific job of capturing your first-person perspective. And that's what people first think of when they think of GoPro. ~ Nick Woodman

I don't live with my role, I'm a really normal person. ~ Marion Cotillard

If the elites listened, they would understand why French young people like me are joining our ranks. ~ Marion Marechal-Le Pen

Men destroy only what they fear. ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

We got a memory so we can carry the past with us some, but we got a mind so we can leave it behind for a spell an' git on down the trail.

Marion Daniels, U.S. Marshal ~ David R. Lewis

Your mother is a shifty knitter. ~ Marion Jensen

Find your truth and make your existence real as you choose it. Your creation is your own greatest gift. (Neings of Light via Joules) ~ Jay Woodman