Quotes from John O'Donohue

Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.

It is such a privilege to have people who continue each day to bless us with their love and prayer. These inner friends of the heart confer on us inestimable gifts.

As clay anchors a tree in light and wind, May your outer life grow from peace within.

We respond with joy to the call of beauty because in an instant it can awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness. Plato said: 'Beauty was ours in all its brightness...Whole were we who celebrated that festival' (Phaedrus).

There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate.

Though beauty is autonomous, there seem to be occasions when human presence can become congruent with her will. In creative work no amount of force or mechanical management can guarantee beauty. Suddenly, without expecting it, beauty is there. Yet ultimately beauty is a profound illumination of presence, a stirring of the invisible in visible form and in order to receive this we need to cultivate a new style of approaching the world.

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. One remembers here Dante's notion that the secret rhythm of the universe is the rhythm of love, which moves the stars and the planets. Love is the source, center, and destiny of experience.

This earth is the only constant in our lives. It has been here for millions of years before us. It was his gift to unearth its riches; that this human-come-lately is but the latest link in the chain of evolution. We must become aware of our present stage of becoming and to do this we need to look back at our history.

Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. ... It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance.

The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits the wonder of our gaze.

The soul is always wiser than the mind, even though we are dependent on the mind to read the soul for us.

May we all receive blessing upon blessing. And may we realize our power to bless, heal, and renew one another.

Life is full of magnetic interims that call what is separate and different to become one, to enter into the art and presence of belonging.

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.

Our grounding in the soul means that regardless of how badly we think of ourselves, there is a wholesomeness in us that no one has ever been able to damage.

do not damage yourselves By attending only at the hungry altar Of regret and anger and guilt.

THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH IS THE FIRST BEAUTY. MILLIONS OF years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the first-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory.

Only the blindness of habit convinces us that we continue to live in the same place, that we see the same landscape. In truth, no place ever remains the same because light has no mind for repetition; it adores difference. Through its illuminations, it strives to suggest the silent depths that hide in the dark. Light

One of John's favorite quotes was from Meister Eckhart: Nothing in the universe resembles God more than silence.

The interplay between farmers and the elements was a poem without words, the echo which would always return to him. The air could hold the breeze of the rain or the wind of warmth to the discerning nose. The stone carved its memory deep into the hands that chiseled it. Fire was life in the hearth which was the center of home. Water introduced itself to us from its most natural source in streams and wells.

Love is also a force of light and nurture that liberates you to inhabit to the full your own difference. There should be no imitation of each other; no need to be defensive or protective in each other's presence. Love should encourage and free you fully into your full potential.

You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.

We also notice, at the other end, how the shadows of old age are lit more and more from the invisible world.

We all have experiences, but as T. S. Eliot said, we had the experience but missed the meaning. Every human heart seeks meaning; for it is in meaning that our deepest shelter lies.