John O'Donohue Quotes

refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.

When we love and allow ourselves to be loved, we begin more and more to inhabit the kingdom of the eternal. Fear changes into courage, emptiness becomes plenitude, and distance becomes intimacy.

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.

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. Self-compassion is a wonderful gift to give yourself. You should never reduce the mystery and expanse of your presence to a haunted fixation with something you did or did not do.

Only holiness will call people to listen now. And the work of holiness is not about perfection or niceness; it is about belonging, that sense of being in the Presence and through the quality of that belonging, the mild magnetic of implicating others in the Presence. This is not about forging a relationship with a distant God but about the realization that we are already within God.

The poor have been doubly impoverished by the ugliness that surrounds them.

The anxieties of old age unclenching into grace

The art of disappearing certainly has its own kind of value. In a strange way, in modern society we seem to be inhabiting the world of absence more than presence through the whole world of technology and virtual reality. Very often it seems that the driven nature of contemporary society is turning us into the ultimate harvesters of absence, that is, ghosts in our own lives.

We have fallen out of belonging.

One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.

The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty says the body is not an object to think about. Rather, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings, which move towards equilibrium.

I often think that there is, in every life, some haunted room that you never want to go into, and that you do your best to forget was there at all. You will never break in that door with your mind, or with your will. Only with the gentle coaxing of the imagination will that door be opened to you and will you be given the gift back again of a part of yourself that either you or someone else had forced you to drive away and reject.

Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to everything else.

nor my favorite blue,
the cobalt
colour of silence.

Landscape has a soul and a presence, and landscape- living in the mode of silence is always wrapped in seamless prayer.