314 Quotes by John O'Donohue

[We] must not shrink from the fullness of our being in attempting to reduce the pain.

One encouraging aspect of the negative is its truthfulness. The negative does not lie. It will tell you clearly where you court absence rather than inhabit presence.

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing.

Reflection comes between us and every other person and object in the world. An object or a person can be reflected in so many different ways. Yet the heart of an object or the essence of the heart can never be reflected. All faith and creativity is the hunger to cross over this frontier, it is the desire for pure and total encounter and belonging. Love is an affair between a reflection and its object.

We ask that streams of Easter light might flow into the intimacy and privacy of our hearts this morning, to heal us and encourage us and enable us to make again a new beginning.

Each tree grows in two directions at once, into the darkness and out into the light with as many branches and roots as it needs to embody its wild desires.

All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and honor these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time.

Most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot sense the shape of ourselves any more.

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.