This page lists some of the all-time best John O’Donohue quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Suffering & Compassion Quotes
- Time & Change Quotes
- Identity & Humanity Quotes
- Beauty & Imagination Quotes
- Spirituality & God Quotes
50+ John O’Donohue Quotes on Beauty, Identity, Spirituality, & More
John O’Donohue Quotes on Suffering & Compassion
“It’s strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you … Thought is the face that we put on the meaning that we feel and that we struggle with, and the world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach.” — John O’Donohue
“The trouble for so many of us is that we have to be in trouble before we remember what’s essential.” — John O’Donohue
“The flawed places in you are actually the most fecund sources of possibility, transfiguration, and transformation.” — John O’Donohue
“Where there isn’t vulnerability, there can be no compassion.” — John O’Donohue
“One of the greatest sins is the un-lived life. Nobody can convert you into your own life but yourself.” — John O’Donohue
“Part of the characteristic or the quality of maturity or growth is to be able to free yourself from the prisons of your own making.” — John O’Donohue
“Every great thinker is haunted by one idea or by one major obsession.” — John O’Donohue
John O’Donohue Quotes on Time & Change
“If you take your time, it’s amazing what will come to meet you … When you have time, your soul begins to decipher things.” — John O’Donohue
“Stress is a perverted relationship to time, so that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven’t had a true moment for yourself, to relax in and to just be.” — John O’Donohue
“When you slow it down, then you find your rhythm. And when you come into rhythm, then you come into a different kind of time.” — John O’Donohue
“The passionate heart never ages.” — John O’Donohue
“The secret of change: there are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of, and then sometimes when we come to a threshold, crossing over which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.” — John O’Donohue
“When their way of being could no longer help them with this, another way of being was being invited from them. And when they yielded to it, it would become transformative.” — John O’Donohue
“If you look at the history of thought and art, it’s usually out of restless times and times of turbulence that great novelty and great light emerges in thought.” — John O’Donohue
John O’Donohue Quotes on Identity & Humanity
“The ‘who’ question is the really magic question about who you are. No one else can tell you that but yourself … No one else can look out for your inner life but yourself … If you don’t look out for your inner life, nobody else can.” — John O’Donohue
“The ontological duty of the human subject is to be who you are.” — John O’Donohue
“The duty of privilege is absolute integrity. The duty of privilege is integrity towards ourselves, towards our possibilities, and to live to the full the life that we’d love, and to animate and realize everything because the time is so short and it will be soon gone.” — John O’Donohue
“All the time, the person that you are here is a result of key choices that you made on thresholds that you’ve probably now forgotten, and you chose along the way until you chose your way into this life now—and that’s why you are who you are.” — John O’Donohue
“No matter how respectable and serious humans look, everyone is an ex-baby … No matter how mature and adult and sophisticated a person might seem, that person is still essentially an ex-baby.” — John O’Donohue
“The beauty of being human is that we are incredibly, intimately near each other, we know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it’s like inside another person.” — John O’Donohue
“Behind every face, there is a secret, hidden, inner life.” — John O’Donohue
“There are no two humans that inhabit the same world. We all inhabit the same world physically, but internally each world is completely different. No one else sees the world the way you do.” — John O’Donohue
“None of us has ever seen our own face.” — John O’Donohue
“The soul choreographs one’s biography and one’s destiny.” — John O’Donohue
“(In America) it often seems to me that a person believes that if they tell you their story, that that’s who they are. And sometimes these stories are constructed of the most banal, secondhand, psychological and spiritual cliché, and you look at a beautiful, interesting face telling a story that you know doesn’t hold a candle to the life that’s secretly in there. So, what I think happens here a bit, is that there’s a reduction of identity to biography. And they’re not the same thing. I think biography unfolds identity and makes it visible and puts the mirror of it out there, but I think identity is a more complex thing.” — John O’Donohue
“Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. The intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.” — John O’Donohue
“What often happens is that people reduce identity to biography … But, in actual fact, your identity is infinitely more complex, nuanced, sophisticated, and mysterious than your biography—or than anything that could ever unfold in your biography.” — John O’Donohue
“It’s always inner disturbance that causes outer disturbance.” — John O’Donohue
“In the presence of the other, you begin to see who you are in how they reflect you back to yourself.” — John O’Donohue
“An awful lot of what passes for conversation in our culture is merely intersecting monologues, and there’s no real conversation.” — John O’Donohue
“One of the greatest tragedies of our times is that everyone is ripping off second-hand thinking from other people which is dead and doesn’t fit them at all. So, one of the things about liberating oneself is to actually trust your own instinct and find the kind of thought lenses which show you your world in the way you need to see it that can calm you and bring you home.” — John O’Donohue
“One of the loneliest things you can find is somebody who is in the wrong kind of work; who shouldn’t be doing what they are doing but should be doing something else, and haven’t the courage to get up and leave it and make a new possibility for themselves. But it’s lovely when you find someone at work who’s doing exactly what they dreamed they should be doing and whose work is an expression of their inner gift. And in witnessing to that gift and bringing it out, they actually provide an incredible service to us all. And I think you see that the gifts that are given to us as individuals are not for us alone, or for our own self-improvement, but they’re actually for the community and to be offered.” — John O’Donohue
John O’Donohue Quotes on Beauty & Imagination
“The experience of the beautiful is like a homecoming to something in us that always knew it.” — John O’Donohue
“Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. Beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.” — John O’Donohue
“One of the huge confusions in our times is to mistake glamour for beauty. We do live in a culture which is very addicted to the image. There is always an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself and the way you are outward. And I feel that there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times and that we need to draw back inside ourselves and that we’ll find immense resources there.” — John O’Donohue
“Beauty ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us.” — John O’Donohue
“There’s a threshold that runs through everything—between light and dark, between masculine and feminine, divine and human, chaos and order—and the magic of the imagination is the navigation and the excavation of that threshold of betweenness.” — John O’Donohue
“Imagination is the great friend of possibility … All facts are children of possibilities.” — John O’Donohue
“The imagination is always interested in that which is not attended to but which is always present.” — John O’Donohue
John O’Donohue Quotes on Spirituality & God
“Spirituality is the art of homecoming.” — John O’Donohue
“The spirit and soul dimensions are not luxury items, but are actually the very origins and sources which will enable everything to flow and unfold in a new way.” — John O’Donohue
“One of the duties that humans have is to try to unclutter their lives of all the false things which pretend to satisfy and still their spiritual hunger but can never actually do it.” — John O’Donohue
“The spiritual life really is about the liberation of God from our images of God.” — John O’Donohue
“The beauty of mysticism is that the mystic is someone who falls in love with God and who has a sense of the pulsing presence of God which no thought, feeling, or category can ever come near.” — John O’Donohue
“Rather than trying to set out in search of God, maybe the secret is to let him find you.” — John O’Donohue
“The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” — John O’Donohue
“If you really live your life to the full, then you are activating and making alive the presence of God within you.” — John O’Donohue
“Presence is the most radical thing in the world.” — John O’Donohue
“Once you get involved with God and taste the divine, there’s nothing else that’ll ever satisfy you again.” — John O’Donohue
“Some of the most secret things are the most sacred things, and if you don’t approach with reverence, they will decide not to approach you.” — John O’Donohue
“If you look at the educational system and you look at most of the public fora in our culture, there is very little time or attention given to what you could almost call learning the art of inwardness; or a pedagogy of interiority.” — John O’Donohue
“Why do we read books? Because that’s where the wisdom is … The first thing you have to do is read the primary sources and trust your own encounter with them.” — John O’Donohue
“Every contemplative needs ritual to make their way through the deserts of solitude.” — John O’Donohue
“If you can attend to the journey with a quality of mindfulness that recognizes what’s unfolding, then the journey becomes the real kind of adventure.” — John O’Donohue
“I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” — John O’Donohue
“Life is the great sacrament, and if we get into it, it looks after us completely.” — John O’Donohue
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