John O'Donohue Quotations

The joyful heart sees and reads the world with a sense of freedom and graciousness.

A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal and strengthen.

The sacred duty of being an individual is to gradually learn how to live so as to awaken the eternal within you.

When we hear some beautiful piece of Mozart or admire a wonderful building, we suddenly become present in ourselves. That's unusual nowadays because dishevelment and distraction have become an art form.

Most people are enduring a marginalized isolation. One of the great obstacles to modern friendships is the 'religion of rush.' People are rushing all the time through time. Friendship takes time.

Much of the stress and emptiness that haunt us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty. Internally, the mind becomes coarse and dull if it remains unvisited by images and thoughts that hold the radiance of beauty.

The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere - in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion, and in ourselves. No one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.

We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning, we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night, we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more.

When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude, and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure and wonder.

Good friends won't let you off the hook when you shouldn't be let off the hook. You can let fall the masks we seem to need to survive in a cutthroat world. There is a value of truth that we typically don't find in other parts of life.

Beauty does not linger; it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm; it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life.

The best decision I ever made was to become a priest and I think the second best was to resign.

The beauty of the Catholic church is that it has a sacramental structure that can hold its own with the best out of any tradition. It has a mystical system and content that can hold its own with the best out of Tibet... its an amazing tradition, but I think you need to be critical.

I think the divine is like a huge smile that breaks somewhere in the sea within you, and gradually comes up again.

If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you.

I believe that our friends among the dead really mind us and look out for us. Often there might be a big boulder of misery over your path about to fall on you, but your friends among the dead hold it back until you have passed by.

Listen carefully to yourself. Listen to what you dislike, and you will find most of the imagery is what you have received and registered from other people. We ingest labels from others.

Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen from one minute to the next. Politics, religion, economics, and the institutions of family and community all have become abruptly unsure.

Either we are in the universe to inhabit the eternity of our souls and grow real, or else we might as well dedicate our days to shopping and kill time watching talk-shows,

A lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself, and lingering and hanging in the darkness is often - I say this against myself - a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light.

When we hear the word 'beauty', we inevitably think that beauty belongs in a special elite realm where only the extraordinary dwells. Yet without realizing it, each day each one of us is visited by beauty. When you actually listen to people, it is surprising how often beauty is mentioned. A world without beauty would be unbearable.

There is an instinct that emerges when we get quiet with people. We know who's close.

We need great prophetic leaders in religion and in spirituality... what we are getting is lacking in vision... not able to engage with the diversity of the culture.

I always was kind of on the edge of the church when I was fully in it, cos I was always asking the questions... And I could never believe blindly.

...the only difference between a young person at the height of their exuberance and a very old person who is frail and physically wasted is time.

I arise to day... In the name of Silence / Womb of the Word, / In the name of Stillness / Home of Belonging, / In the name of the Solitude / of the Soul and the Earth

The infinite is a light sleeper. The moment the self awakens, the force of the infinite begins to stir.

Belonging is a circle that embraces everything; if we reject it, we damage our nature.The word 'belonging' holds together the two fundamental aspects of life: Being and Longing, the longing of our Being and the being of our Longing.

In contrast to how a child belongs in the world, adult belonging is never as natural, innocent, or playful. Adult belonging has to be chosen, received, and renewed. It is a lifetime's work.

It is human longing that makes us holy.

Yet we do not need to put any strain on our longing. If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us.

Art is the essence of awareness.

The idea [of therapy] isn't to give people answers, or lead their bark of longing into a safe, dull, protected harbor, but to make people aware of the depths of possibility in their hearts and lives; help them remove the barriers that keep them from being the people they were meant to be.

All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and honor these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time.

Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment.

In the name of the Fire, The Flame And the Light; Praise the pure presence of fire That burns from within Without thought of time.

In order to inherit your freedom, you need to go towards it. You have to claim your own freedom before it becomes yours.

The world rests in the night.

Sometimes ideas hold us down; they become heavy anchors that hold the bark of identity fixated in shallow, dead water.

Habit is a strong invisible prison.

Die Wunden des Geistes heilen, ohne dass Narben bleiben"..."The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars.

You lose the balance of your sould if you not learn to take care of yourself.

So much depends not on how awkward destiny is, but rather on how openly it is embraced.

One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement.

Often regret is very false and displaced, and imagines the past to be totally other than it was.

I have never seen white so absolute / And alone, glistening in awkward form / Dreaming across the water a bright path. / As it stirs and changes I see what it is: / Two swans have found the mirror in the lake / Where a V of horizon lets light through / To make them light-source and light-shape in one. / Now they swim and fade through windows of reed / And disrobe the lake of apparition.

Creativity is rich with unexpected possibility. Know-how is mere fragmented mechanics which lacks tradition.

The hunger to belong is not merely a desire to be attached to something. It is rather sensing that great transformation and discovery become possible when belonging is sheltered and true.

As you grow, you develop the ideal of where your true belonging could be - the place, the home, the partner, and the work. You seldom achieve all the elements of the ideal, but it travels with you as the criterion and standard of what true belonging could be.

When a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time.

Imitate the habit of twilight,/Taking time to open the well of color/That fostered the brightness of day.

...we are custodians of deep and ancient thresholds. In the human face you see that potential and the miracle of undying possibility.

Celtic spirituality is awakening so powerfully now because it illuminates the fact that the visible is only one little edge of things. The visible is only the shoreline of the magnificent ocean of the invisible.

Everything and everyone we see, we view through the lenses of our thoughts. Your mind is where your thoughts arise and form. It is not simply with your eyes but with your mind that you see the world.

The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.

When time is reduced to linear progress, it is emptied of presence.

Thought is an amazing thing: it can be a mirror, a lens, a bridge, a wall, a window, a ladder or a house. There is nothing in the world that has the cutting edge of a new thought.

When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.

The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.

We are privileged, and the duty of privilege is absolute integrity.

I do not wish to criticize any system that can nourish people’s spirits, but I find that a lot of New Age writing cherry-picks the attractive bits from the ancient traditions and makes collages of them; it usually excises the ascetic dimension. In general it is not rigorously thought out, but is what I would call “soft” thinking.

When your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colours, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.

I am sure of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections.

If you are striving to be equal to your destiny and worthy of the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart, then you should be regularly reaching new horizons.

Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.

We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes toward us.

...to gaze into the face of another is to gaze into the depth and entirety of his life.

It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is a flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing.

The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home in the hearth of your soul.

In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together.

Light is incredibly generous, but also gentle.

We have surface time, which is the time we move through every day, but we need to reach the rhythms of deep time. Like the ocean is all waves and movement on the surface, we need to sink through time to the depths where the true rhythm lies.

When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. This moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim, something more than the person looks out.

One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.

Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather. ... The past seems to be gone and absent. Yet the grooves in the mind hold the traces and vestiga of everything that has ever happened to us. Nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown

Unfinished Poem I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.

It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there.

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing.

Sometimes people are very worried about dying. There is no need to be afraid. when the moment of your dying comes, you will be given everything that you need to make that journey in a graceful, elegant, and trusting way.

We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program for our lives.

I arise today... Blessed by all things / wings of breath, / delight of eyes, / wonder of whisper, / intimacy of touch, / eternity of soul, / urgency of thought, / miracle of health, / embrace of God

Each one of us was sent here for a special destiny.

Often there might be a big boulder of misery over your path about to fall on you, but your friends among the dead hold it back until you have passed by.

It's a dangerous thing to name yourself wrongly or to name yourself unjustly.

When one flower blooms spring awakens everywhere

The duty of priviledge is absolute intregity

Somewhere, out at the edges, the night / Is turning and the waves of darkness / Begin to brighten the shore of dawn... The heavy dark falls back to earth / And the freed air goes wild with light, / The heart fills with fresh, bright breath / And thoughts stir to give birth to colour

When you forgive, some deeper, divine generosity takes you over... When you cannot forgive, you are a prisoner of the hurt done to you.

Your body is as ancient as the clay of the universe from which it is made; and your feet on the ground are a constant connection with the earth. Your feet bring your private clay in touch with the ancient, mother clay from which you first emerged.

At death, this physical separation is broken. The soul is released from its particular and exclusive location in this body. The soul then comes in to a free and fluent universe of spiritual belonging.

May you respond to the call of your gift, and find the courage to follow its path.

When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape.

A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.

When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life - truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of belonging; they are also the secret intention and dream of human longing.

When you tame and domesticate the divine it loses its danger and it's power to forgive you, make you happy, or its power to challenge you, and call you towards new growth.

Even though life may have moved wearily and painfully through such a person, they have still managed not to let it corrode their soul. In such a face a lovely luminosity shines out into the world. It casts a tender light that radiates a sense of wholeness and wholesomeness.

Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.

The one you love, your anam cara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul.

There is a relentless search for the factual and this quest often lacks warmth or reverence. At a certain stage in our life we may wake up to the urgency of life, how short it is. Then the quest for truth becomes the ultimate project. We can often forage for years in the empty fields of self-analysis and self-improvement and sacrifice much of our real substance for specks of cold, lonesome factual truth. The wisdom of the tradition reminds us that if we choose to journey on the path of truth, it then becomes a sacred duty to walk hand in hand with beauty.