John O'Donohue Quotes & Sayings

The essence of who you are is ultimately mysterious, ungraspable and numinous-completely different from every other structure of matter. — John O'Donohue

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. — John O'Donohue

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. — John O'Donohue

In our mediocrity and distraction, we forget that we are privileged to live in a wondrous universe. — John O'Donohue

Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. — John O'Donohue

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

The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness. — John O'Donohue

Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity. — John O'Donohue

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

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

When one flower blooms spring awakens everywhere — John O'Donohue

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

There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate. — John O'Donohue

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

The human face is the subtle yet visual autobiography of each person, — John O'Donohue

Our neon times have neglected and evaded the depth-kingdoms of interiority in favour of the ghost realms of cyberspace. Our world becomes reduced to intense but transient foreground. We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds where the unknown awaits us. We have become haunted pilgrims addicted to distraction and driven by the speed and colour of images. I — John O'Donohue

Keep Something Beautiful in your Heart to Survive Difficult Times and Enjoy Good Times. — John O'Donohue

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. — John O'Donohue

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. — John O'Donohue

We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos. — 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

When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time. On its outer surface time is vulnerable to transience. Regardless of its sadness or beauty, each day empties and vanishes. In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration. Time minds possibility and makes sure that nothing is lost or forgotten. That which seems to pass away on the surface of time is in fact transfigured and housed in the tabernacle of memory. Possibility is the secret heart of creativity. — John O'Donohue

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

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

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. — John O'Donohue

If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings. Sometimes the great famine of blessings in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love; rather, we are living the life that is expected of us. We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature. — John O'Donohue

When you really love someone, you shine the light of your soul on the beloved. We know from nature that sunlight brings everything to growth. If you look at flowers early on a spring morning, they are all closed. When the light of the sun catches them, they trustingly open out and give themselves to the new light. — John O'Donohue

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

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 — John O'Donohue

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

If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. 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. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you. — John O'Donohue

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

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

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

Your life becomes the shape of the days you inhabit. — John O'Donohue

We are privileged, and the duty of privilege is absolute integrity. — John O'Donohue

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

We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us. — John O'Donohue

The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual, slow beat; always inching its way forward, change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it. — John O'Donohue

When a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time. — John O'Donohue

A day is precious because each day is essentially the microcosm of your whole life. — John O'Donohue

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

Often regret is very false and displaced, and imagines the past to be totally other than it was. — John O'Donohue

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

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

Functionalism is lethal when it is not balanced by a sense of reverence. Without reverence, there is no sense of presence or wonder. — John O'Donohue

Truth is paradox. — John O'Donohue

The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused. — John O'Donohue

One of the most precious things you should always preserve in a friendship and in love is your own difference. — John O'Donohue

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. — John O'Donohue

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. — John O'Donohue

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. — John O'Donohue

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

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

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. — John O'Donohue

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

Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible. — John O'Donohue

Each one of us was sent here for a special destiny. — John O'Donohue

The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. We avoid it or quell it by filtering it through our protective barriers of domestication and control. The normal way never leads home. — 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

The unity of four elements is what constitutes and sustains our existence in this world. — John O'Donohue

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

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

Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there? Perhaps your place loves having you there. It misses you when you are away and in its secret way rejoices when you return. Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it? Perhaps your favourite place feels proud of you. — John O'Donohue

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. — John O'Donohue

A friend is someone who wishes what is good for the other. — John O'Donohue

In our rapid and externalized world, language has become ghostlike, abbreviated to code and label. Words that would mirror the soul carry the loam of substance and the shadow of the divine. The sense of silence and darkness behind the words in more ancient cultures, particularly in folk culture, is absent in the modern use of language. Language is full of acronyms; nowadays we are impatient of words that carry with them histories and associations. — 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

Silence is the voice of the mystery. Silence let us dream again. — John O'Donohue

A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal and strengthen. — John O'Donohue

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

It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you. — John O'Donohue

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. — 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

In a sense, one could speak of the secret life of colour. Despite its outward beckoning, like true beauty, colour is immensely hesitant in giving away its secrets. Painters learn to respect the hesitancy of colour and endeavour to refine their skill to become worthy of its revelations. A painter learns the language of colour slowly. As with any language, you struggle for a long time outside the language. There is a willed deliberateness to how you sequence the strange words to make a sentence.Then one day the language lets you in to where the words dance to your thoughts with ease and fluency. Perhaps for the painter there is a day when colour lets him in, when his palette sings with synergy and delight. — John O'Donohue

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

And when the work of grieving is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time. — John O'Donohue

Each of us carries a unique world within our hearts. — John O'Donohue

You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire. — John O'Donohue

THE INNER HISTORY OF A DAY No one knew the name of this day; Born quietly from deepest night, It hid its face in light, Demanded nothing for itself, Opened out to offer each of us A field of brightness that traveled ahead, Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps And the light of thought to show the way. The mind of the day draws no attention; It dwells within the silence with elegance — John O'Donohue

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

When you have moments on your own or spaces in your time, just focus on the well at the root of your soul. Imagine that nourishing stream of belonging, ease, peace, and delight. Feel, with your visual imagination, the refreshing waters of that well gradually flowing up through the arid earth of the neglected side of your heart. It is helpful to imagine this particularly before you sleep. Then during the night you will be in a constant flow of enrichment and belonging. You will find that when you awake at dawn, there will be a lovely, quiet happiness in your spirit. One — John O'Donohue

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

When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered. — John O'Donohue

To create a space for all our words, Drawing us to listen inward and outward. 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. Somewhere in us a dignity presides That is more gracious than the smallness That fuels us with fear and force, A dignity that trusts the form a day takes. So at the end of this day, we give thanks For being betrothed to the unknown And for the secret work Through which the mind of the day And wisdom of the soul become one. — John O'Donohue

Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence. — John O'Donohue

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. — John O'Donohue

The joyful heart sees and reads the world with a sense of freedom and graciousness. — John O'Donohue

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

I asked him what advice he could give me as I began my research on Hegel. He said that most research tries to establish a conclusion or reach verification that no one can successfully criticize or undermine. Everyone attempts that; there is nothing new in it. I should take a different approach. He said that if I try to discover a few questions in this area that no one has thought of asking, then I will have discovered something truly original and important. — John O'Donohue

The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration. — John O'Donohue

If you live in this world with kindness, if you don't add to other people's burdens, but if you try to serve love, when the time comes for you to make the journey, you will receive a serenity, peace and a welcoming freedom that will enable you to go to the other world with great elegance, grace and acceptance. — John O'Donohue

The interplay between farmers and the elements was a poem without words, the echo which would always return to him.
The air could hold the "breeze of the rain" or the "wind of warmth" to the discerning nose.
The stone carved its memory deep into the hands that chiseled it.
Fire was life in the hearth which was the center of home.
Water introduced itself to us from its most natural source in streams and wells. — John O'Donohue

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

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

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

We were once enwombed in the earth and the silence of the body remembers that dark, inner longing. Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, memories from the time before the mind was born. Within us are depths that keep watch. These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle. — John O'Donohue

The silence of landscape conceals vast presence. Place is not simply location. A place is a profound individuality. With complete attention, landscape celebrates the liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly to the passion of the goddess. The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness. Mountains are huge contemplatives. Rivers and streams offer voice; they are the tears of the earth's joy and despair. The earth is full of soul ... Civilization has tamed place. Left to itself, the curvature of the landscape invites presence and the loyalty of stillness. — John O'Donohue

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

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