Top 100 John O'Donohue Quotes
#1. May I live this day ... Compassionate of heart, / Gentle in word, / Gracious in awareness / Courageous in thought, / Generous in love / Eternal Echoes
John O'Donohue
#2. To understand the harvest of your soul against the background of seasonal rhythm should give you a sense of quiet delight at the arrival of this time in your life. It should give you strength and a sense of how the deeper belonging of your soul-world will be revealed to you.
John O'Donohue
#3. 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.
John O'Donohue
#4. 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.
John O'Donohue
#5. As high over the mountains the eagle spreads its wings, may your perspective be larger than the view from the foothills. When the way is flat and dull in times of gray endurance, may your imagination continue to evoke horizons.
John O'Donohue
#6. We are privileged, and the duty of privilege is absolute integrity.
John O'Donohue
#7. 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.
John O'Donohue
#8. We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.
John O'Donohue
#9. The call to the creative life is a call to dignity, to a life of vulnerability and adventure and the call to a life that exquisite excitement and indeed ecstasy will often visit.
John O'Donohue
#10. The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together
John O'Donohue
#11. Poetry is the place where language in its silence is most beautifully articulated. Poetry is the language of silence.
John O'Donohue
#12. We were sent into the world alive with beauty. As soon as we choose Beauty, unseen forces conspire to guide and encourage us towards unexpected forms of compassion, healing and creativity.
John O'Donohue
#13. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.
John O'Donohue
#14. 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.
John O'Donohue
#15. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows.
John O'Donohue
#16. At a deeper level, each person is the custodian of a completely private, individual world.
John O'Donohue
#17. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you.
John O'Donohue
#18. To have true integrity, poise, and courage is to be attuned to the silent and invisible nature within you.
John O'Donohue
#19. Though the human body is born complete in one moment, the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process. It is being birthed in every experience of your life. Everything that happens to you has the potential to deepen you. It brings to birth within you new territories of the heart.
John O'Donohue
#20. The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life.
John O'Donohue
#21. Negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form ... you can transfigure negativity by turning it toward the light of your soul.
John O'Donohue
#22. The one you love, your anam cara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul.
John O'Donohue
#23. We live in an intense and visually aggressive age; everything is drawn outward toward the sensation of the image.
John O'Donohue
#24. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.
John O'Donohue
#25. When you listen with your soul, you come into rhythm and unity with the music of the universe.
John O'Donohue
#26. Fashioned from the earth, we are souls in clay form. We need to remain in rhythm with our inner clay voice and longing.
John O'Donohue
#27. A day is precious because each day is essentially the microcosm of your whole life.
John O'Donohue
#28. We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home.
John O'Donohue
#29. All the animals and creatures of this earth are our former brothers and sisters but because we believe that we have "dominion" over them, we have become cruel little emperors.
John O'Donohue
#30. Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.
John O'Donohue
#31. For millions of years, an ancient conversation has continued between the chorus of the ocean and the silence of the stone.
John O'Donohue
#32. The life and passion of a person leave an imprint on the ether of a place. Love does not remain within the heart, it flows out to build secret tabernacles in a landscape.
John O'Donohue
#33. When you've gone as far as you can go, quietly await your next beginning.
John O'Donohue
#34. Each of us carries a unique world within our hearts.
John O'Donohue
#35. Silence is the voice of the mystery. Silence let us dream again.
John O'Donohue
#36. The messenger comes from that distant place Beside us where we cannot remember How unlikely it is that we are here Keepers of interiors not our own Strangers in whom dawn and twilight are one. Twilight
John O'Donohue
#37. Your body is your clay home; your body is the only home that you have in this universe. It is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you. Your body is the home of your soul on earth.
John O'Donohue
#38. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.
John O'Donohue
#39. To gaze into the face of another is to gaze into the depth and entirety of his life.
John O'Donohue
#40. Although you should not erase your responsibility for the past, when you make the past your jailer, you destroy your future. It is such a great moment of liberation when you learn to forgive yourself, let the burden go, and walk out into a new path of promise and possibility.
John O'Donohue
#41. Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuristic eye of a neon culture. Real intimacy is of the soul, and the soul is reserved.
John O'Donohue
#42. 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.
John O'Donohue
#43. Your noble friend will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. Such friendship is creative and critical; it is willing to negotiate awkward and uneven territories of contradiction and woundedness.
John O'Donohue
#44. When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.
John O'Donohue
#45. 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.
John O'Donohue
#46. How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth? Where the infinite stillness of the earth meets the passion of the human eye, invisible depths strain towards the mirror of the name. In the word, the earth breaks silence.
John O'Donohue
#47. There is an unseen life that dreams us; it knows our true direction and destiny. We can trust ourselves more than we realize, and we need have no fear of change.
John O'Donohue
#48. The search for meaning is really the search for the lost chord. When the lost chord is discovered by humankind, the discord in the world will be healed and the symphony of the universe will come into complete harmony with itself.
John O'Donohue
#49. 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.
John O'Donohue
#50. Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe.
John O'Donohue
#52. 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.
John O'Donohue
#53. You lose the balance of your sould if you not learn to take care of yourself.
John O'Donohue
#54. The false burdens fall away. We come into rhythm with ourselves. Our clay shape gradually learns to walk beautifully on this magnificent earth. A
John O'Donohue
#55. It's a dangerous thing to name yourself wrongly or to name yourself unjustly.
John O'Donohue
#56. 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.
John O'Donohue
#57. 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.
John O'Donohue
#58. The most exuberant expression of the body is in dance. Dance theater is wonderful. The dance becomes fluent sculpture. The body shapes the emptiness poignantly and majestically. The
John O'Donohue
#59. If you allow yourself to be the person you are then everything will come into rhythm.
John O'Donohue
#60. May my life flow like a river, ever surprised by its own unfolding.
John O'Donohue
#62. Your life becomes the shape of the days you inhabit.
John O'Donohue
#63. The best decision I ever made was to become a priest and I think the second best was to resign.
John O'Donohue
#64. 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.
John O'Donohue
#65. Creativity is rich with unexpected possibility. Know-how is mere fragmented mechanics which lacks tradition.
John O'Donohue
#68. The light of our thought is always excavating our rich inheritance of darkness. The cradle of origin whose mysteries arise with the dawn, darkness is also the secret homeland where the slow harvestings of twilight return to become woven into the subtle eternity of memory: The
John O'Donohue
#69. A friend is someone who wishes what is good for the other.
John O'Donohue
#70. 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.
John O'Donohue
#71. Our world is becoming more busy and noisy.
We are pushing silence out of our lives at a rate that suggests a fear of what it has to say to us about ourselves.
John O'Donohue
#72. One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.
John O'Donohue
#73. And when we come to search for God, Let us first be robed in night, Put on the mind of morning To feel the rush of light Spread slowly inside The color and stillness Of a found world.
John O'Donohue
#74. The visible is only the shoreline of the magnificent ocean of the invisible.
John O'Donohue
#76. A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.
John O'Donohue
#77. We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes toward us.
John O'Donohue
#78. Through friendship and love, you learn to attune yourself to the silence, to the thresholds of mystery where your life enters the life of your beloved and the beloved's life enters yours.
John O'Donohue
#79. 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.
John O'Donohue
#80. The sacred duty of being an individual is to gradually learn how to live so as to awaken the eternal within you.
John O'Donohue
#82. A book is a path of words which takes the heart in new directions.
John O'Donohue
#83. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul.
John O'Donohue
#84. To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.
John O'Donohue
#85. One of the most precious things you should always preserve in a friendship and in love is your own difference.
John O'Donohue
#86. Keep Something Beautiful in your Heart to Survive Difficult Times and Enjoy Good Times.
John O'Donohue
#87. The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.
John O'Donohue
#88. A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal and strengthen.
John O'Donohue
#89. 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.
John O'Donohue
#90. One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.
John O'Donohue
#91. We cannot fill up our emptiness with objects, possessions or people. We have to go deeper into that emptiness, then we will find beneath nothingness the flame of love to warm us.
John O'Donohue
#92. To be spontaneous is to escape the cage of the ego by trusting that which is beyond the self.
John O'Donohue
#93. May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.
John O'Donohue
#94. 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.
John O'Donohue
#95. All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.
John O'Donohue
#96. Take time to see the quiet miracles that
seek no attention
John O'Donohue
#97. Our bodies know they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless.
John O'Donohue
#98. 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.
John O'Donohue
#99. 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.
John O'Donohue
#100. Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness; the perennial infusion of springtime into the winter of bleakness.
John O'Donohue
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