Quotes from John O'Donohue

There is the infinity of the microcosm: one little speck on the top of your thumb contains a whole inner cosmos, but it is so tiny that it is not visible to the human eye. The infinity in the microscopic is as dazzling as that of the cosmos. However, the infinity that haunts everyone and which no one can finally quell is the infinity of one's own interiority

We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes toward us.

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.

Suddenly, your voice Calling out my name. I call yours. The echoes take us To the heart of the mountains. When the silence closes, You say: Now that they Have called our names back The mountains can Never forget us.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A good beginning is half the work.

In the letters between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya there is the beautiful recognition: "When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, its sound is often no louder than the beating of your heart and it is very easy to miss it.

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.

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.

May I live this day compassionate of heart, clear in word, gracious in awareness, courageous in thought and generous in love.

From time immemorial it has been one of the deepest longings of the human heart to strain against the erosion of one's life, to find a way of living and being that manages to find some stable ground within time, a place from where something eternal can be harvested from our disappearance. This is what all art strives for: the creation of a living permanence.

The commercial edge of so-called progress has cut away a huge region of human tissue and webbing that held us in common with one another.

in the cry of a well that slips from dark the earth began to dream you; how it would polish from precious stones dust for a face, from tears of sycamores tone for your eyes.

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

May I have the courage today To live the life that I would love, To postpone my dream no longer, But do at last what I came here for And waste my heart on fear no more.

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

nor my favorite blue, the cobalt colour of silence.

Soft and warm you encircle me, into the cave of my ear your lips infuse a mantra, over and over to coax the well awake.

Rodin's art 'was not based upon any great idea, but upon the conscientious realisation of something small, upon something capable of achievement, upon a matter of technique. There was no arrogance in him, he devoted himself to this insignificant and difficult aspect of beauty which he could survey, command and judge. The other, the greater beauty must come when all was ready for it as animals come to drink when night holds sway and the forest is free of strangers.

Indeed, a book is a path of words which takes the heart in new directions.