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John O'Donohue Quotes | Quotes said by John O'Donohue

  • John O'Donohue Quote #1

    ...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 Quote #2

    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 Quote #3

    Beannacht / Blessing

    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 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.

    When the canvas frays
    in the currach 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 Quote #4

    Beauty is the illumination of your soul.

  • John O'Donohue Quote #5

    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 Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    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 Quote #8

    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 place
    You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;
    And a time when that bitter tree was planted

    That has grown always invisibly beside you
    And whose branches your awakened hands
    Now long to disentangle from your heart.

    You are coming to see how your looking often darkened
    When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,
    How deep down your eyes were always owned by something

    That faced them through a dark fester of thorns
    Converting 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 covering
    And according to your readiness, everything will open.

    May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide
    Who can accompany you through the fear and grief
    Until 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 wound

    So 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 Quote #9

    Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe.

  • John O'Donohue Quote #10

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

  • John O'Donohue Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    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 Quote #16

    Inspiration is always a surprising visitor.

  • John O'Donohue Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you.

  • John O'Donohue Quote #20

    It's strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you alone.

  • John O'Donohue Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    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 Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.

  • John O'Donohue Quote #26

    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 Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    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.

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