Gathered for the 2002 Winter Conference by Patricia O'Malley and Joan Mansfield
The Tao of Women
The wise woman remembers her origins. She returns often for self-renewal and re-birth
The Tao of Women
Intuition: Intelligence beyond words; survival skills.
The Tao of Women
Maintaining her connections to the earth, she is connected to her self. Every step the wise woman takes is sacred ground.
The Tao of Women
Trust your instincts. They embody your authentic responses to your surroundings.
The Tao of Women
When life provides pain, embrace your grief and sadness. When life provides joy, celebrate your happiness.
The Tao of Women
The wise woman waters her own garden first
The Tao of Women
Celebrate the changing seasons of your life: Youth, Adolescence, Woman, Crone. Imitate Mother Nature as if you had a choice.
The Tao of Women
Surround yourself with women and speak your truth. Both men and women will listen.
The Tao of Women
Stay still. There, between the breaths, know thyself.
The Tao of Women
There is not a path that has not already been walked by the women who have gone before. You do not walk this path alone.
The Tao of Women
The wise woman, going with the flow, smoothes even the sharpest rock.
The Tao of Women
When you don't judge your feelings, you can experience a world of possibilities.
The Tao of Women
When the ordinary becomes sacred, all of life is honored.
The Tao of Women
Above all, respect yourself. Give your time, your energy, your money, but not your soul.
The Tao of Women
Do not become a victim and the oppression will stop.
The Tao of Women
The river floods when its banks are full. Respect your limits; just do what you can do.
The Tao of Women
When an extraordinary woman is found, sit by her side. Watch and listen as she weaves her stories into your life.
The Tao of Women
The wise woman receives the best gifts from herself.
The Tao of Women
When a woman accepts her problems, she is ready to begin her healing.
The Tao of Women
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach; one can collect only a few.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Perhaps this very instant is your time…your own, your peculiar, your promised and presaged moment, out of all moments forever.
Louise Bogan
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Gertrude Stein
No person could save another. The only one who can save me is me.
Joyce Carol Oates
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
Joan Baez
Within our dreams and aspirations we find our opportunities.
Sue Atchley Ebaugh
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursala K. LeGuin
Noble deeds and not baths are the best cures for depression.
Dodie Smith
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
Anonymous
The distance doesn't matter; only the first step is difficult.
Mme. DuDeffand
Our soul makes constant noise, but it has a silent place we never hear.
Simone Weil
Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.
Helen Keller
The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.
Martha Washington
Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals.
Lydia M. Child
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Sometime in your life you will go on a journey. It will be the longest journey you have ever taken. It is the journey to find yourself.
Katherine Sharp
"Hope" is the thing with feathers --- that perches in the soul.
Emily Dickinson
Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have.
Doris Mortman
So many women just don't know how great they really are. They come to us all vogue on the outside and vague on the inside.
Mary Kay Ash
Any little bit of experimenting in self-nurturance is very frightening for most of us.
Julia Cameron
We are the heroines of our own story.
Mary McCarthy
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
Judy Garland
Learn the craft of knowing how to open your heart and to turn on your creativity. There's a light inside of you.
Judith Jamison
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.
Pearl Buck
The body must be nourished, physically, emotionally and spiritually. We're spiritually starved in this culture - not underfed but undernourished.
Carol Hornig
Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.
Florence Scovel Shinn
Mothering myself has become a way of listening to my deepest needs, and of responding to them while I respond to my inner child.
Melinda Burns
Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.
Anne Wilson Schaef
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
Virginia Woolf
Gardening is an instrument of grace.
May Sarton
Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.
Louise Driscoll
Meaning, moods, the whole scale of our inner experiences, finds in nature "the correspondences" through which we may know our boundless selves.
Kathleen Raine
We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.
Madeleine L'engle
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face….You must do the thing you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Flops are part of life's menu and I'm never a girl to miss out on a course.
Rosalind Russell
My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.
Anne Lamott
Dance like no one is watching, sing like no one is listening, and love like you can't be hurt.
We must never forget that we are animals, gloriously endowed.
Elaine Goldman
Gill Woman who stops the world am I. Legendary woman who cures am I.
Maria Sabina Mayatec - Shaman
Ask within for her advice. She is the Mother of the Ages. Nothing surprises her. She has seen it all.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
To live sacred lives requires that we live at the edge of what we do not know.
Anne Hillman
Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
Come old one, Mountain crone, give us your wisdom, Come moon, give us your silver..
Shekhinah Mountainwater
Faith took her deep into the woods, Sat her down, and asked her to follow her heart.
Melissa Harris
Women, please let your own sun, your concentrated energy, your own submerged authentic vital power shine out from you.
Raicho Hiratsuko
I am a woman, a part of the whole of the first circle, the circle that transcends space and time, the circle of women joined.
Ann Valliant
I see the wise woman. She carries a blanket of compassion. She wears a robe of wisdom.
Susun Weed - Healing Wise
The flourishing of a feminist matristic vision today is a sign that it may not be too late to save our mother's life.
Gloria Orenstein - The Reflowering of the Goddess
The Old Woman is our beginnings and our endings, and our beginnings again. Enriched by the experiences of living, she is the missing link in the sacred circle.
Jeanne Brooks Carritt
As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, the world is my country.
Virginia Woolf
The earth is the mother of all that is natural, of all that is human.
Hildegard of Bingen - 12th century
Great Mother, I am your daughter and I call to you. Teach me courage and kindness and how to love myself.
A prayer to Gaia - Sedonia Cahill
There is a Goddess in me. I am learning her dances by the dark of the moon. She awakens and sings, " Oh moon-dancing woman - Blessed Be."
Claudia L'Amoreaux
Take a risk on the universe to support you in whatever it is you want to do.
Myrtle Stedman, 93
There is magic when I choose to see you as Spirit having a human experience.
Claire Johnson
Something happens in the company of women. Souls open like the sun, rising between blue mountains.
Rebecca Rajswasser
"Soak your feet in a bowl of moonlight," my grandma used to say, "The moonlight will soothe what ails you in an effervescent way."
Rhea Giffin
When I am hurt, in pain, I go to the water; she heals me with her power.
Jacqueline Letalien
Watching the moon at midnight, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely, no part left out.
Izumi Shikibu - (974-1034)
In the beginning, people prayed to the Creatress of Life, the Mistress of Heaven. At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman. Do you remember?
Merlin Stone
There is a cave deep in the center of your heart. It is the birth cave of the Goddess. Do you remember? You have been there.
Claudia L'Amoreaux
Love wanders about through the senses, and then it storms the soul with all its powers.
Mechtild of Magdeburg
Earth Mother, Star Mother, you who are called by a thousand names, may all remember we are cells in your body and dance together…..
Starhawk
Round the Mother Tree we dance Honoring past Imagining blessed future
Claudia L'Amoreaux
Old Kali came bustin round my doorstep the other day. You know who I mean, the Great Black Mother who knows how to change things. Powerful Woman!
Suzy Coffee
There are fairies underfoot Be careful not to squish them! They sprinkle hearts and crescent moons along the path - Glitter everywhere!
Phyllis Hanniver
MORE QUOTES (gathered by Jean Pierce)
If you obey the rules, you miss all the fun.
Katherine Hepburn
Round the table, peace and joy prevail. May all who share this season's delight enjoy countless more.
Chinese Blessing
The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
Helen Keller
You are either the captive of the captain of your thoughts.
If you don't hear opportunity knocking, find another door.
You may have a fresh start any moment you choose. For this thing we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.
If the only prayer you pray is "Thank You" that would suffice.
Meister Eckhart
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, that is translated through you; and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
Martha Graham
The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.
Margaret Fuller
It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are…not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit with….that you can begin to take control.
Oprah Winfrey
What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness.
Helen Keller
While we are born with curiosity and wonder and our early years full of the adventure they bring, I know such inherent joys are often lost. I also know that, being deep within us, their latent glow can be fanned to flame again by awareness and an open mind.
Sigurd Olson
The sun brings forth from the beginning
The moon holds it in darkness
As above, so below
For there is no greater magic in all the world
Than that of people joined together in love.
Wiccan Blessing
How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you, A place for you to go to be with your mother, with your sisters and the aunts, with your grandmothers, and the great and great-great grandmothers, a place of women to go, to be, to return to, as woman? How might your life be different?
Judith Duerk
The soul and the spirit have resources that are astonishing. Like wolves and other creatures, the soul and spirit are able to thrive on very little, and sometimes for a long time on nothing. To me, it is the miracle of miracles that this is so.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes