Top 100 O'donohue Quotes
#1. For millions of years, an ancient conversation has continued between the chorus of the ocean and the silence of the stone.
John O'Donohue
#2. 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.
John O'Donohue
#3. So take a breath and find what is unsolved in your heart.
Breathe in patience, breathe in love.
Love yourself bountiful.
And send that love out to others.
When you send love out from the bountifulness of your own love, it reaches other people.
This love is the deepest power of prayer.
John O. Donohue
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Silence is the voice of the mystery. Silence let us dream again.
John O'Donohue
#7. Each of us carries a unique world within our hearts.
John O'Donohue
#8. When you've gone as far as you can go, quietly await your next beginning.
John O'Donohue
#9. 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
#10. Fear changes into courage, emptiness becomes plenitude, and distance becomes intimacy.
John O'Donohue
#11. 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.
John O'Donohue
#12. It's strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you alone.
John O'Donohue
#13. We seldom notice how each day is a holy place Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens, Transforming our broken fragments Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.
John O'Donohue
#14. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.
John O'Donohue
#15. 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
#16. The secret dream of thought is to enfold everything within the contour of the idea.
John O'Donohue
#17. T. S. Eliot that say And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And to know the place for the first time. L
John O'Donohue
#18. THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH IS THE FIRST BEAUTY. MILLIONS OF years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the first-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory.
John O'Donohue
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. A day is precious because each day is essentially the microcosm of your whole life.
John O'Donohue
#22. 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
#23. When you listen with your soul, you come into rhythm and unity with the music of the universe.
John O'Donohue
#24. When your life awakens and you begin to sense the destiny that brought you here, you endeavour to live a life that is generous and worthy of the blessing and invitation that is always calling you.
John O'Donohue
#25. To the judgmental eye, everything is closed in definitive frames. When the judgmental eye looks out, it sees things in terms of lines and squares.
John O'Donohue
#26. I don't believe you have to get a peaceful heart, I think there is a native tranquility within each of us that's already there. And through quieting your mind and your heart, you can slip right down into it.
John O'Donohue
#28. Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe.
John O'Donohue
#29. 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
#30. All human creativity issues from the urgency of longing.
John O'Donohue
#31. 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
#32. 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.
John O'Donohue
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. May you respond to the call of your gift, and find the courage to follow its path.
John O'Donohue
#36. A generous heart is never lonesome. A generous heart has luck. The lonesomeness of contemporary life is partly due to the failure of generosity. Increasingly we complete with each other for the goods, for image, and status.
John O'Donohue
#37. 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
#38. Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see this day?
John O'Donohue
#39. The body is your only home in the universe. It is your house of belonging here in the world. It is a very sacred temple. To spend time in silence before the mystery of your body brings you toward wisdom and holiness.
John O'Donohue
#40. 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
#42. The longing at the heart of attraction is for union with the Beautiful.
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. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. The infinite is a light sleeper. The moment the self awakens, the force of the infinite begins to stir.
John O'Donohue
#48. Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.
John O'Donohue
#49. To gaze into the face of another is to gaze into the depth and entirety of his life.
John O'Donohue
#50. May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the facade of your life, something beautiful, good, and eternal is happening.
John O'Donohue
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Playfulness, humour and even a sense of the anarchic are companions of reverence because they insist on the proper proportion of the human presence in the light of the eternal.
John O'Donohue
#54. Poetry is the place where language in its silence is most beautifully articulated. Poetry is the language of silence.
John O'Donohue
#55. A person's beauty is sophisticated and sacred and is far beyond image, appearance or personality.
John O'Donohue
#56. The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together
John O'Donohue
#57. 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
#58. Consumerism is the worship of the god of quantity; advertising is its liturgy. Advertising is schooling in false longing.
John O'Donohue
#59. We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.
John O'Donohue
#60. Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility.
John O'Donohue
#61. 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
#62. We are privileged, and the duty of privilege is absolute integrity.
John O'Donohue
#63. You can never love another person unless you are equally involved in the beautiful but difficult spiritual work of learning to love yourself.
John O'Donohue
#64. Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in. By being attuned to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place that your will and intellect, have constructed.
John O'Donohue
#65. 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
#66. There is an instinct that emerges when we get quiet with people. We know who's close.
John O'Donohue
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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.
John O'Donohue
#70. Each day is a journey. We come out of the night into the day. All creativity awakens at this primal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other. You only discover balance in your life when you learn to trust the flow of this ancient rhythm.
John O'Donohue
#71. The human face is the subtle yet visual autobiography of each person,
John O'Donohue
#72. Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur. Something in our souls longs deeply for that graciousness and delight. When we advert to the presence of beauty, the direction, rhythm and energy of our lives become different. The
John O'Donohue
#73. 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.
John O'Donohue
#74. When you forgive, some deeper, divine generosity takes you over ... When you cannot forgive, you are a prisoner of the hurt done to you.
John O'Donohue
#75. 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.
John O'Donohue
#76. When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.
John O'Donohue
#77. When people get into therapy, or when they need healing, their real hope is that they'll come to the secret frontier in themselves, some unknown source of energy and healing in themselves, where the divinity of who-ness is protected. This is a spiritual quest.
John O'Donohue
#78. 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
#79. We live in an intense and visually aggressive age; everything is drawn outward toward the sensation of the image.
John O'Donohue
#80. The one you love, your anam cara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul.
John O'Donohue
#81. Respectability and security are subtle traps on life's journey. Those who are drawn to extremes are often nearer to renewal and self-discovery. Those trapped in the bland middle region of respectability are lost without ever realizing it.
John O'Donohue
#82. 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
#83. The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life.
John O'Donohue
#84. Love is anything but sentimental. In fact, it is the most real and creative form of human presence. Love is the threshold where divine and human presence ebb and flow into each other.
John O'Donohue
#85. To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision.
John O'Donohue
#86. 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
#87. 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.
John O'Donohue
#88. The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light on the world of the soul.
John O'Donohue
#89. 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
#90. To have true integrity, poise, and courage is to be attuned to the silent and invisible nature within you.
John O'Donohue
#91. Everything in the world of soul has a deep desire and longing for visible form; this is exactly where the power of the imagination lives.
John O'Donohue
#92. May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours, may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
John O'Donohue
#93. 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
#94. At a deeper level, each person is the custodian of a completely private, individual world.
John O'Donohue
#95. When a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time.
John O'Donohue
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you.
John O'Donohue
#99. When you are compassionate with yourself, you trust in your soul, which you let guide your life. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny better than do.
John O'Donohue
#100. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.
John O'Donohue
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