John O'Donohue Quotes

Imagination according to William Blake is about the awakening to and recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that there is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake.

So take a breath and find what is unsolved in your heart.
Breathe in patience, breathe in love.
Love yourself bountiful.
And send that love out to others.
When you send love out from the bountifulness of your own love, it reaches other people.
This love is the deepest power of prayer.

In the light and reverence of blessing, a person or situation becomes illuminated in a completely new way. In a dead wall a new window opens, in dense darkness a path starts to glimmer, and into a broken heart healing falls like morning dew.

You know that if you are graced with creative and compassionate and warm awareness, you are going to have and incredible life. You are going to have sufferings as well, but you will always return to that place of warmth and fire within yourself.

Often people’s identities, that wild inner complexity of soul and color of spirit, become shrunken into their work identities. They become prisoners of their roles. They limit and reduce their lives. They become seduced by the practice of self-absence. They move further and further away from their own lives. They are forced backward into hidden areas on the ledges of their hearts. When you encounter them, you meet only the role. You look for the person, but you never meet him. To practice only the linear external side of your mind is very dangerous. Thus the corporate and work world now recognizes how desperately they need the turbulence, anarchy, and growth possibilities that come from the unpredictable world of the imagination. These are so vital for the passion and force of a person’s life. If you engage only the external side of yourself, and stay on this mechanical surface, you become secretly weary. Gradually, years of this practice make you desperate.

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 imagination loves symbol because it recognizes that inner divinity can only find expression in symbolic form. The symbol never gives itself completely to the light. It invites thought precisely because it resides at the threshold of darkness.

We have often heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is usually taken to mean that the sense of beauty is utterly subjective; there is no accounting for taste because each person's taste is different. The statement has another, more subtle meaning: if our style of looking become beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.

Against all attempts at programs and methods, the great art of holiness is to let oneself be.

We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes toward us.

and warm awareness, you are going to have an incredible life. You are going to have sufferings as well, but you will always return to that place of warmth and fire within yourself.

Soft and warm
you encircle me,
into the cave of my ear
your lips infuse a mantra,
over and over
to coax the well awake.

Silence is the voice of the mystery. Silence let us dream again.

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.

If you sin against your soul, it is always at great cost. Work can be an attractive way of sinning deeply against the wildness and creativity of your own soul.

One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.