Quotes from John O'Donohue

To young mind, work seemed to be the price that was gladly paid for the privilege of living so closely with the earth. Work was a real conversation with the landscape. It was not an abuse or raiding of the landscape. It was amazing to learn how to work in this context.

The more we recognize our found blessings, the more they increase around us.

Maybe this is one of the secrets of death: that you die only when your invisible, unchosen lives have also fulfilled themselves, so that you bring into the eternal world not only your one known life but also the unknown, unchosen lives as well.

The beauty of being human is the capacity and desire for intimacy. Yet we know that even those who are most intimate remain strange to us. Like children, we often "make strange" with each other.

The deepest things that you need are not elsewhere. They are here and now in that circle of your own soul. Real friendship and holiness enable a person to frequently visit the hearth of his solitude;

We put terrible pressure on our minds. When we tighten them or harden our views or beliefs, we lose all the softness and flexibility that makes for real shelter, belonging, and protection. Sometimes the best way of caring for your soul is to make flexible again some of the views that harden and crystalize your mind; for these alienate you from your own depth and beauty.

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.

The most subversive invitation you could ever accept is the invitation to awaken to who you are and where you have landed.

We live in a world that responds to our longing; it is a place where the echoes always return, even if sometimes slowly.

Sometimes, it is easy to be generous outward, to give and give and give and yet remain ungenerous to yourself. You lose the balance of your soul if you do not learn to take care of yourself. You need to be generous to yourself in order to receive the love that surrounds you.

IT IS STRANGE TO BE HERE. THE MYSTERY NEVER LEAVES YOU alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.

Good conversation is the enemy of falsity, facade, and shallowness. It chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade and it penetrates the depths so as to soar into unfolding possibility.

The mind of blessing is wise, and it knows that whatever torments or diminishes a person cannot be healed simply from within that diminishment; consequently it addresses the wholeness and draws that light and healing into the diminished area.

A blessing is not a sentiment or a question; it is a gracious invocation where the human heart pleads with the divine heart.

I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from the earth and now walking on the normal landscape.

All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking.

One of the most exciting and energizing forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a though that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways of wonder.

May I live this day Compassionate of heart, Clear in word, Gracious in awareness, Courageous in thought, Generous in love.

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.

One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that everyone is ripping off second hand thinking. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm and bring us home, and also challenge us.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.

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.

At the gates of time, blessing waits to usher toward us the grace we need.

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