When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life – truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of belonging; they are also the secret intention and dream of human longing.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Goodness, Balance
Habit is a strong invisible prison.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Habit
It’s a dangerous thing to name yourself wrongly or to name yourself unjustly.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Being True to Yourself
In order to inherit your freedom, you need to go towards it. You have to claim your own freedom before it becomes yours.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Freedom
Creativity is rich with unexpected possibility. Know-how is mere fragmented mechanics which lacks tradition.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Creativity, To Be Born Everyday
We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.
—John O’Donohue
The duty of privilege is absolute integrity.
—John O’Donohue
We have surface time, which is the time we move through every day, but we need to reach the rhythms of deep time. Like the ocean is all waves and movement on the surface, we need to sink through time to the depths where the true rhythm lies.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Time
Celtic spirituality is awakening so powerfully now because it illuminates the fact that the visible is only one little edge of things. The visible is only the shoreline of the magnificent ocean of the invisible.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Vision
We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Worry
Often regret is very false and displaced, and imagines the past to be totally other than it was.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Regret
When you tame and domesticate the divine it loses its danger and it’s power to forgive you, make you happy, or its power to challenge you, and call you towards new growth.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Forgiveness
When you learn to embrace your self with a sense of appreciation and affection, you begin to glimpse the goodness and light that is in you and gradually you will realize that you are worthy of respect from yourself. When you recognize your limits, but still embrace your life with affection and graciousness, the sense of inner dignity begins to grow. You become freer and less dependent on the affirmation of outer voices and less troubled by the negativity of others.
—John O’Donohue
Although you should not erase your responsibility for the past, when you make the past your jailer, you destroy your future. It is such a great moment of liberation when you learn to forgive yourself, let the burden go, and walk out into a new path of promise and possibility.
—John O’Donohue
Topics: Responsibility, The Past, Past
When one flower blooms spring awakens everywhere.
—John O’Donohue
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