John O'Donohue Quotes

We were all reared in a world that concentrated on sin and sinfulness, but I believe that when we come into the eternal world we won’t so much be checked for our failures, but we will be asked whether we honored the possibilities that were placed inside us when we were so carefully fashioned out of the clay.

There was a contest in Ancient Greece to find out who could write a sentence that would somehow always be true. The sentence that won the competition was “This too shall pass.

When a person is at home in his life, he always has a clear instinct about the shape of outer situations; even in the midst of confusion he can discern the traces of a path forward.

Meister Eckhart said that nothing in the universe resembles God so much as silence, so if you think about silence in that sense, then to come into silence is to come into the presence of the Divine. In a way, you allow yourself to be enfolded by that stillness. In a real sense, the deepest thing in a human heart is not the verbiage but is actually that still silence — not the silence of Buddhism, which often seems to me maybe something anonymous — but is the silence of intimacy where no word is needed and where a word would actually be a fracture.

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

The passionate heart never ages.

There is nothing as un-neutral as a home. Even the most ordinary home is an implicit theater to subversive inner happenings. It is the most self-effacing laboratory of consciousness quietly shaping belief, expectation, and life direction.

I have learned myself painfully that you can only relate to someone if you somehow have the courage and the need to inhabit your own solitude. You can only relate out of your separateness, otherwise you are just using the other person to shield you from your own solitude.

FOR A NEW BEGINNING

In out of the way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you have outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

seems that when a person finds himself in extremis and gathers his mind and calls out, something comes awake in the highest regions of destiny. Time behaves differently when blessing is invoked.

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.

We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man once said to a friend of mine in Gaelic, ‘we’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have short exposure.’ You have to begin to transfigure your fear...at the end of your life, when death comes, it won’t be some kind of monster, but it can actually be a friend who hides the most truthful image of your soul.

A lot of experiences that we have in the world are torn, broken, hard experiences, and in broken, difficult, lonesome experiences you earn a quality of light that is very precious. I often think of it as quarried light.

To live like this is to experience time as a constant invitation to growth

feel that old age and aging is a time of great gathering, a time of sifting and a time of reaping the rewards of forgotten and neglected experience.