John O'Donohue Quotes

It's strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you alone".
John O'Donohue
For LongingBlessed be the longing that brought you hereAnd quickens your soul with wonder.May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desireThat disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own uneaseTo discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.May the forms of your belonging—in love, creativity, and friendship—Be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.May the one you long for long for you.May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.May a secret Providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.May your mind inhabit life with the sureness with which your body inhabits the world.May your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.
John O'Donohue
Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened.
John O'Donohue
Take time to see the quiet miracles thatseek no attention
John O'Donohue
The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.
John O'Donohue
Reflection comes between us and every other person and object in the world. An object or a person can be reflected in so many different ways. Yet the heart of an object or the essence of the heart can never be reflected. All faith and creativity is the hunger to cross over this frontier, it is the desire for pure and total encounter and belonging. Love is an affair between a reflection and its object.
John O'Donohue
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
May the light of your soul guide you; May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the secret love and warmth of your heart; May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul; May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work; May your work never weary you; May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration and excitement; May you be present in what you do. May you never become lost in the bland absences; May the day never burden; May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities and promises; May evening find you gracious and fulfilled; May you go into the night blessed, sheltered and protected; May your soul calm, console and renew you.
John O'Donohue
The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.
John O'Donohue
So at the end of this day, we give thanksFor being betrothed to the unknown.
John O'Donohue
It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you.
John O'Donohue
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
We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program for our lives.
John O'Donohue
You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul, there will be a youthfulness in you that no one will be able to take away from you.
John O'Donohue
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
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.
John O'Donohue
The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.
John O'Donohue
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
There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.
John O'Donohue
Though beauty is autonomous, there seem to be occasions when human presence can become congruent with her will. In creative work no amount of force or mechanical management can guarantee beauty. Suddenly, without expecting it, beauty is there. Yet ultimately beauty is a profound illumination of presence, a stirring of the invisible in visible form and in order to receive this we need to cultivate a new style of approaching the world.
John O'Donohue
For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:For everything under the sun there is a time.This is the season of your awkward harvesting,When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a placeYou had forgotten you knew from the inside out;And a time when that bitter tree was plantedThat has grown always invisibly beside youAnd whose branches your awakened handsNow long to disentangle from your heart.You are coming to see how your looking often darkenedWhen you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,How deep down your eyes were always owned by somethingThat faced them through a dark fester of thornsConverting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;You could only see what touched you as already torn.Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.And your memory is ready to show you everything,Having waited all these years for you to return and know.Only you know where the casket of pain is interred. You will have to scrape through all the layers of coveringAnd according to your readiness, everything will open. May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guideWho can accompany you through the fear and griefUntil your heart has wept its way to your true self.As your tears fall over that wounded place,May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.May your forgiveness still the hunger of the woundSo that for the first time you can walk away from that place, Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.
John O'Donohue
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
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
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
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
The earth is our origin and destination. 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. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here.
John O'Donohue
What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.
John O'Donohue
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
Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.
John O'Donohue
All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, and contours. You feel the inspiration of its possibilities and the wonder of its mysteries.
John O'Donohue
One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.
John O'Donohue
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
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.
John O'Donohue
Beauty is the illumination of your soul.
John O'Donohue
When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.
John O'Donohue
Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe.
John O'Donohue
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
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
...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
Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.
John O'Donohue
When time is reduced to linear progress, it is emptied of presence.
John O'Donohue
Inspiration is always a surprising visitor.
John O'Donohue
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
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
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
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
When one flower blooms spring awakens everywhere
John O'Donohue
Beannacht / BlessingOn the day whenthe weight deadenson your shouldersand you stumble,may the clay danceto balance you.And when your eyesfreeze behindthe grey windowand the ghost of lossgets in to you,may a flock of colours,indigo, red, green,and azure bluecome to awaken in youa meadow of delight.When the canvas fraysin the currach of thoughtand a stain of oceanblackens beneath you,may there come across the watersa path of yellow moonlightto bring you safely home.May the nourishment of the earth be yours,may the clarity of light be yours,may the fluency of the ocean be yours,may the protection of the ancestors be yours.And so may a slowwind work these wordsof love around you,an invisible cloakto mind your life.
John O'Donohue
For Equilibrium, a Blessing:Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.As the wind loves to call things to dance,May your gravity by lightened by grace.Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.As water takes whatever shape it is in,So free may you be about who you become.As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,May your sense of irony bring perspective.As time remains free of all that it frames,May your mind stay clear of all it names.May your prayer of listening deepen enoughto hear in the depths the laughter of god.
John O'Donohue
No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entrance. No one else can see the world the way you see it. No one else can feel your life the way you feel it. Thus it is impossible to ever compare two people because each stands on such different ground. When you compare yourself to others, you are inviting envy into your consciousness; it can be a dangerous and destructive guest.
John O'Donohue
We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.
John O'Donohue
Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of your affection. You lose the attraction and the magic. Your sense of each other darkens and your presence is sore. If you can come through this time, it can purify with your love, and falsity and need will fall away. It will bring you onto new ground where affection can grow again.
John O'Donohue
Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition.
John O'Donohue