314 Quotes by John O'Donohue

You cannot dredge the depths of the soul with the meagre light of self analysis. The inner world never reveals itself cheaply. Perhaps analysis is the wrong way to approach our inner dark ... There is a healing for each of our wounds, but this healing is waiting in the indirect, oblique, and nonanalytic side of our nature.

The wonderful conductor Sergeiu Celibadache said, 'We do not create music; we only create the conditions so that she can appear.

One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.

The human heart is a theater of longing.

You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.

Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. ... It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance.

This breakage within us is what makes us human and vulnerable. There is nothing more sinister than someone whose mind seems to be an absolute circle; there is a helpless coldness and a deadly certainty about such a presence.

When you learn to love and let yourself be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit. You are warm and sheltered. Your are completely at one in the house of your own longing and belonging.

We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. The gift of the world is our first blessing.