Welcome to our collection of quotes by John O'Donohue. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for John O'Donohue
John O'Donohue (1 January 1956 – 4 January 2008) was an Irish poet, author, priest, and Hegelian philosopher. He was a native Irish speaker, and as an author is best known for popularising Celtic spirituality.
Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieve by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition.
Celtic spirituality is awakening so powerfully now because it illuminates the fact that the visible is only one little edge of things. The visible is only the shoreline of the magnificent ocean of the invisible.
The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together.
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.
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.
You can never love another person unless you are equally involved in the beautiful but difficult spiritual work of learning to love yourself.
One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement.
We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes toward us.
If you allow yourself to be the person you are then everything will come into rhythm.
Often regret is very false and displaced, and imagines the past to be totally other than it was.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ironically, your trust in your inner belonging radically alters your outer belonging. Unless you find belonging in your solitude, your external longing will remain needy and driven.
Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. ... It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance.
It deserves to be remembered that from ancient times the soul had depth, danger, and unpredictability precisely because it was seen as the presence of the divine within us.
Most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot sense the shape of ourselves any more.
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.
To describe the human body as the temple of the Holy Spirit recognizes that the body is suffused with wild and vital divinity.
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.
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.
You can search far and in hungry places for love. It is a great consolation to know that there is a wellspring of love within yourself. If you trust that this wellspring is there, you will then be able to invite it to awaken.
If you are outside yourself, always reaching beyond yourself, you avoid the call of your own mystery. 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.
When you come into your solitude, you come into companionship with everything and everyone. When you extend yourself frenetically outward, seeking refuge in your external image or role, you are going into exile.
Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe.
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.
The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.
So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown.
Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than their facts.
We have to let go in order to be; we have to stop forcing ourselves, or we will never enter our own belonging.
The ego is threatened, competitive, and stressed, whereas the soul is drawn more toward surprise, spontaneity, the new and the fresh. It avoids what is weary, worn, or repetitive.
It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity that has brought you here. When you begin to decipher this, your gift and giftedness come alive. Your heart quickens and the urgency of living rekindles your creativity.
This breakage within us is what makes us human and vulnerable. There is nothing more sinister than someone whose mind seems to be an absolute circle; there is a helpless coldness and a deadly certainty about such a presence.
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.
We cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for the things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home at the hearth of your soul.
Your soul mediates between your body and your mind; it shelters the two and holds them together.
When you are in rhythm with your nature, nothing destructive can touch you. Providence is at one with you; it minds you and brings you to new horizons. To be spiritual is to be in rhythm.
We should avoid the false dualism that separates the soul from the body.
To spend time in silence before the mystery of your body brings you toward wisdom and holiness.
You do not have to go away outside yourself to come into real conversation with your soul and with the mysteries of the spiritual world. The eternal is at home -- within you.
Sometimes our spiritual programs take us far away from our inner belonging. We become addicted to the methods and programs of psychology and religion. We become so desperate to learn how to be, that our lives pass, and we neglect the practice of being.
Your body knows you very intimately; it is aware of your whole spirit and soul life.
The moment your fear transfigures, you come into rhythm with your own self.
To be natural is to be holy; but it is very difficult to be natural. To be natural is to be at home with your own nature. If you are outside yourself, always reaching beyond yourself, you avoid the call of your own mystery.
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. Your are completely at one in the house of your own longing and belonging.
When the unconscious becomes illuminated, its darker forces no longer hold us prisoner. This work of freedom is slow and unpredictable, yet it is precisely at this threshold that each individual is the custodian and subject of their own transfiguration.
The imagination is committed to the justice of wholeness. It will not choose one side in an inner conflict and repress or banish the other; it will endeavor to initiate a profound conversation between them in order that something original can be born.
The beauty of being human is the capacity and desire for intimacy. Yet we know that even those who are most intimate remain strange to us. Like children, we often make strange with each other.
If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition; there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The wildness of God is the sensuousness of God. Nature is the direct expression of the divine imagination. It is the most intimate reflection of God's sense of beauty.
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.
We ask that streams of Easter light might flow into the intimacy and privacy of our hearts this morning, to heal us and encourage us and enable us to make again a new beginning.
Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.
There is such an intimate connection between the way we look at things and what we actually discover. If you can learn to look at yourself and your life in a gentle, creative, and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find.
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.
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.
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.
There is an instinct that emerges when we get quiet with people. We know who's close.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the divine is like a huge smile that breaks somewhere in the sea within you, and gradually comes up again.
The best decision I ever made was to become a priest and I think the second best was to resign.
If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere -- in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion, and in ourselves. No one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.
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.
A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal and strengthen.
The joyful heart sees and reads the world with a sense of freedom and graciousness.