John O'Donohue
John O'Donohue
John O'Donohuewas an Irish poet, author, priest, and Hegelian philosopher. He was a native Irish speaker, and as an author is best known for popularising Celtic spirituality...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth1 January 1956
CountryIreland
beautiful fall night
Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.
inspirational heaven quests
We [humans] are the only creatures who are in-between. We're of the earth, but don't belong to it, because we strain after the heavens; and yet the heavens aren't full in us. So this wonderful, restless, eternal longing in us has us always on a quest.
struggle fall dark
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.
beauty creativity healing
We were sent into the world alive with beauty. As soon as we choose Beauty, unseen forces conspire to guide and encourage us towards unexpected forms of compassion, healing and creativity.
creative awkward noble
Your noble friend will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. Such friendship is creative and critical; it is willing to negotiate awkward and uneven territories of contradiction and woundedness.
soul able anam-cara
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.
home house soul
To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.
reflection light shining
The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light on the world of the soul.
kindness journey destiny
Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.
inspirational love-is differences
One of the most precious things you should always preserve in a friendship and in love is your own difference.
mirrors silence soul
In our rapid and externalized world, language has become ghostlike, abbreviated to code and label. Words that would mirror the soul carry the loam of substance and the shadow of the divine. The sense of silence and darkness behind the words in more ancient cultures, particularly in folk culture, is absent in the modern use of language. Language is full of acronyms; nowadays we are impatient of words that carry with them histories and associations.
beautiful home order
In turning away from beauty, we turn away from all that is wholesome and true, and deliver ourselves into an exile where the vulgar and artificial dull and deaden the human spirit [] In contrast, the Beautiful offers us an invitation to order, coherence, and unity. When these needs are met, the soul feels at home in the world.
destiny soul geography
Your soul knows the geography of your destiny.
eye squares looks
To the judgmental eye, everything is closed in definitive frames. When the judgmental eye looks out, it sees things in terms of lines and squares.