Donohue Quotes & Sayings

I've been auditioning since I'm nine years old. Honestly, most of my friends I've met in audition rooms because you're always auditioning. — Kether 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

Fear changes into courage, emptiness becomes plenitude, and distance becomes intimacy. — John O'Donohue

Donohue: "It is Christianity that [Manson] hates, and it is Catholicism that he hates most of all. This guy is at war with Christ." Manson: "I can't possibly be at war with Christ, because your religion killed him and what he stood for. But if you want to be at war with me, bring it on." — Marilyn Manson

Imitate the habit of twilight,/Taking time to open the well of color/That fostered the brightness of day. — John O'Donohue

When I go into 'You're the Worst,' I'm very glammed up, and my hair and makeup is va-va-voom. Now what I'm having fun with in 'Grease' is, honestly, I go to rehearsals with zero makeup. When I get pimples, I get excited about it, like 'Yay! It helps the character!' The frumpier and uglier and grosser, the better with Jan. — Kether 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

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

Just because something good happens to someone else doesn't mean something good won't also happen to you — Meg 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

While the rest of the body is covered, the face is naked. The vulnerability of this nakedness issues a profound call for understanding and compassion. The human face is a meeting place of two unknowns: the infinity of the outer world and the unchartered, inner world to which each individual alone has access. This is the night world that lies behind the brightness of the visage. The smile on a face is a surprise or illumination. It is as if the inner night of this hidden world brightens suddenly, when the smile crosses the face. Heidegger — John O'Donohue

Habit is a strong invisible prison. — 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

The Glittering World is a stunning phantasmagoria drawn from the world just beneath the surface, aswarm with great and memorable characters and a plot that twists and turns as it hurtles forward. A grand debut. One taste, and you'll be addicted. — Keith Donohue

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

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

Though cruel now, it serves a deeper kindness, Wise to the larger call of growth. It invites us to humility And the painstaking work of acceptance So — John O'Donohue

Patrick Kavanagh put it, preparing for life rather than living it. — John O'Donohue

The infinite is a light sleeper. The moment the self awakens, the force of the infinite begins to stir. — 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 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. — John O'Donohue

It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, 'Being here is so much,' and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. — 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 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

BEANNACHT For Josie On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight. When the canvas frays in the curach of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to 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 slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life. — John O'Donohue

There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. — John O'Donohue

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

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

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

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

The structure serves the people, people don't serve the structure — William Anthony 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

The bed in which we spend a third of our lives functions as a kind of protective haven for the true self, the subconscious refuge from the assault of the external world. The bed becomes the restorative womb, where the imagination is nurtured while our resting bodies are safe. — Keith Donohue

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. — 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

I've always had this feeling," Henry says, "that all dogs are really therapy dogs. — Meg Donohue

The philosopher Schopenhauer said, 'Opposites throw light upon each other.' Beauty does not belong exclusively to the regions of light and loveliness, cut off from the conversation of oppositions. The vigour and vitality of beauty derives precisely from the heart of difference. No life is one-sided; the life of each of us is animated by the inner conversation of forces which counter and complement each other. Beauty inhabits the cutting edge of creativity
mediating between the known and unknown, light and darkness, masculine and feminine, visible and invisible, chaos and meaning, sound and silence, self and others. — John O'Donohue

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

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 enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god. — John O'Donohue

It's strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you alone. — John O'Donohue

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 — John O'Donohue

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

When time is reduced to linear progress, it is emptied of presence. — John O'Donohue

You lose the balance of your sould if you not learn to take care of yourself. — John O'Donohue

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

I am gone and am not coming back, but I remember everything. — Keith Donohue

Art is the essence of awareness. — John O'Donohue

A Blessing; 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

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

When you begin to sense that your imagination is the place where you are most divine, you feel called to clean out of your mind all the worn and shabby furniture of thought. You wish to refurbish yourself with living thought so that you can begin to see. — John O'Donohue

He could be alone with her, but it was difficult learning to be alone without her. — Keith Donohue

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

History is an amazing presence
it is the place where vanished time gathers. While we are in the flow of time, it is difficult to glean its significance, and it is only in looking back that we can recognize the hidden dimensions at work within a particular era or epoch. — 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

Life is full of magnetic interims that call what is separate and different to become one, to enter into the art and presence of belonging. — John O'Donohue

If you have everything the world has to offer you, but you do not have love, then you are the poorest of the poorest of the poor. — John O'Donohue

The saints suffered many hardships as well, and many were psychologically challenged, but they had something to fall back on - Jesus Christ. He is there for others as well, but no one is obliged to accept his hand. For intellectuals, the thought of doing so is not just bizarre, it is scary: to reach out to God would be to acknowledge their subordinate status, and that is not something their ego will allow. Surrendering to God is not in their cards. So they suffer. — Bill Donohue

(If God wills it) ... the number of angels ... may be infinite ... Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed. Once upon a time, atoms did not exist. There was no Dalton, no Rutherford. Albert Einstein was nothing more than a theorist, but you only have to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to know that things invisible exist and bear great power. The power to destroy. Or the power to create ... Atoms and angels, reason and faith ... One without the other is less than half as strong and can be a danger to our vitality. Reason is subject to the tests of logic and observable, demonstrable phenomena. Faith is tested by our desire and will. One cannot see faith, just as one cannot pour out hope or love from a beaker. Self-sacrifice and devotion escape the strongest microscope, but such qualities of spirit can be shown and known by us all ... And so with God's messengers, more believed than seen, more felt than touched, our angel's exist in open hearts, if we have but faith. — Keith Donohue

May my life flow like a river, ever surprised by its own unfolding. — John O'Donohue

She tilts the computer screen toward Drew "A boy," she says. "Luke." ...
"Luke," Drew repeats. "Bible or Star Wars?"
"Star Wars," Vanessa says, thinking of Teri's engineer husband. — Meg Donohue

Consumerism is the worship of the god of quantity; advertising is its liturgy. Advertising is schooling in false longing. — 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

It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. — William Anthony 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

Frequently, beauty is playful like dancing sunlight, it cannot be predicted, and in the most unlikely scene or situation can suddenly emerge. This spontaneity and playfulness often subverts our self-importance and throws our plans and intentions into disarray. Without intending it, we find ourselves coming alive with a sense of celebration and delight. The pedestrian sequence of a working day breaks, a new door opens and the heart recognizes the silent majesty of the ordinary. The things we never notice, like health, friends and love, emerge from their subdued presence and stand out in their true radiance as gifts we could never have earned or achieved. Beauty — John O'Donohue

I've done commercials that Sam Mendes directed. Paul Feig directed me in a commercial. — Kether Donohue

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

Hair, apparently, is the new window to the soul. — Meg 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

For millions of years, an ancient conversation has continued between the chorus of the ocean and the silence of the stone. — 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

Muslims are right to be angry. — William Anthony 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

An unknown world aspires toward reflection. — John O'Donohue

In real everyday life, I don't walk around feeling fat, and if on TV I'm considered fat, honestly, I kind of like it, because I'm a big advocate of positive unique representations of women in media. And so I like how I'm able to represent a curvier body and still be beautiful. — Kether Donohue

The flickering candlelight conspired with the silence, and we only interrupted each other's reading to share a casual delight. — Keith 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

There's just something fascinating to me about watching a business interaction unfold, and the negotiation. And how everything is negotiable in life. — Kether Donohue

Beauty is the illumination of your soul. — John O'Donohue

Over the previous few weeks, I'd finally perfected the Julia St. Clair wedding cupcake: classic lemon cake with a hidden heart of my mom's boldly flavoured passion fruit filling, slathered high with Julia's favorite vanilla buttercream icing and glammed up a bit with sparkling curls of candied lemon rind. — Meg Donohue

Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness; the perennial infusion of springtime into the winter of bleakness. — 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

A book is a path of words which takes the heart in new directions. — John O'Donohue

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

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

Each of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. ... When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. — 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

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

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

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. — John O'Donohue

We need to have greater patience with our sense of inner contradiction in order to allow its different dimensions to come into conversation within us. There is a secret light and vital energy in contradiction. Where is energy, there is life and growth. Your contemplative solitude will allow your contradictions to emerge with clarity and force. If you remain faithful to this energy, you will gradually come to participate in a harmony that lies deeper than any contradiction. This will give you new courage to engage the depth, danger, and darkness of your life. — John O'Donohue

To lose one's name is the beginning of forgetting. — Keith Donohue

The heart is the inner face of your life. The human journey strives to make this inner face beautiful. It is here that love gathers within you. Love is absolutely vital for a human life. For love alone can awaken what is divine within you. In love, you grow and come home to your self. When you learn to love and let yourself be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit. You are warm and sheltered. — John O'Donohue

The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever. — Keith Donohue

Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe. — John O'Donohue