John O'donohue Quotes

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

We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program for our lives.

~ John O'donohue

All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and honor these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time.

~ John O'donohue

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

~ 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

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

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.

~ John O'donohue

The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.

~ John O'donohue

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

For LongingBlessed be the longing that brought you hereAnd quickens your soul with wonder.May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desireThat disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own uneaseTo discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.May the forms of your belonging—in love, creativity, and friendship—Be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.May the one you long for long for you.May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.May a secret Providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.May your mind inhabit life with the sureness with which your body inhabits the world.May your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.

~ John O'donohue

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

~ John O'donohue

The joyful heart sees and reads the world with a sense of freedom and graciousness.

~ John O'donohue

We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. 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.

~ John O'donohue

The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere - in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion, and in ourselves. No one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.

~ John O'donohue

Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen from one minute to the next. Politics, religion, economics, and the institutions of family and community all have become abruptly unsure.

~ 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

We need great prophetic leaders in religion and in spirituality... what we are getting is lacking in vision... not able to engage with the diversity of the culture.

~ 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

Beauty does not linger; it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm; it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life.

~ John O'donohue

Much of the stress and emptiness that haunt us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty. Internally, the mind becomes coarse and dull if it remains unvisited by images and thoughts that hold the radiance of beauty.

~ John O'donohue

I think the divine is like a huge smile that breaks somewhere in the sea within you, and gradually comes up again.

~ John O'donohue