John O'Donohue Quotes

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.

— 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

“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

“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 one flower blooms spring awakens everywhere”

— 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

“Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.”

— 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

“The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life.”

— John O'Donohue

“Take time to see the quiet miracles that
seek no attention”

— 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

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 world rests in the night.”

— John O'Donohue

“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

“The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration.”

— John O'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

This earth is the only constant in our lives. It has been here for millions of years before us. It was his gift to unearth its riches; that this "human-come-lately" is but the latest link in the chain of evolution.
We must become aware of our present stage of "becoming" and to do this we need to look back at our history.

— John O'Donohue

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. Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.

— 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

“And when we come to search for God, Let us first be robed in night, Put on the mind of morning To feel the rush of light Spread slowly inside The color and stillness Of a found world.”

— John O'Donohue

“Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace.”

— 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

“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

“To young mind, work seemed to be the price that was gladly paid for the privilege of living so closely with the earth. Work was a real conversation with the landscape. It was not an abuse or raiding of the landscape. It was amazing to learn how to work in this context.”

— John O'Donohue

“There is a desperate hunger for belonging. People feel isolated and cut off. Perhaps this is why a whole nation can assemble around the images of celebrities. They have no acquaintance with these celebrities personally. They look at them from a distance and project all their longings onto them. When something happens to a celebrity, they feel as if it is happening to themselves. There is an acute need for the reawakening of the sense of community.”

— John O'Donohue

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

— 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

“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

When we hear the word 'beauty', we inevitably think that beauty belongs in a special elite realm where only the extraordinary dwells. Yet without realizing it, each day each one of us is visited by beauty. When you actually listen to people, it is surprising how often beauty is mentioned. A world without beauty would be unbearable.

— John O'Donohue

“May I have the courage today to live the life I would love ... to postpone my dream no longer. But do at last what I came here for and waste my heart on fear no more.”

— 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

“Each of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Â… 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

“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

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

“One of the most powerful and prophetic analysts was Karl Marx. He showed how work can alienate a person from their nature and potential. Certain work can dull and darken human presence ... the linear mind can miss its gift ... Perception is crucial to understanding.”

— John O'Donohue

“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.”

— John O'Donohue

“May your body be blessed.
May you realize that your body is
a faithful and beautiful friend of your soul.
And may you be peaceful and joyful and
recognize that your senses are sacred thresholds.
May you realize that holiness is mindful gazing,
feeling, hearing and touching.
May your senses gather you and bring you home.
May your senses always enable you to celebrate
the universe and the mystery and possibilities
in you presence here.
May the Eros of the Earth bless you.”

— 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

“The essence of who you are is ultimately mysterious, ungraspable and numinous-completely different from every other structure of matter.”

— 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

“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

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. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.

— John O'Donohue

“It's a dangerous thing to name yourself wrongly or to name yourself unjustly.”

— John O'Donohue

“Each one of us was sent here for a special destiny.”

— 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

I have never seen white so absolute / And alone, glistening in awkward form / Dreaming across the water a bright path. / As it stirs and changes I see what it is: / Two swans have found the mirror in the lake / Where a V of horizon lets light through / To make them light-source and light-shape in one. / Now they swim and fade through windows of reed / And disrobe the lake of apparition.

— John O'Donohue

“As you grow, you develop the ideal of where your true belonging could be - the place, the home, the partner, and the work. You seldom achieve all the elements of the ideal, but it travels with you as the criterion and standard of what true belonging could be.”

— 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

“In order to inherit your freedom, you need to go towards it. You have to claim your own freedom before it becomes yours.”

— 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