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Author: John O'Donohue
Quotes of Author: John O'Donohue
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  1. John O'Donohue _ Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic

    Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition. This metaphor of friendship can be grounded in the clay nature of the human body. When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together. It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, your lover's clay and your clay lay side by side. Then in the turning of the seasons, your one clay divided and separated. You began to rise as distinct clay forms, each housing a different individuality and destiny. Without even knowing it, your secret memory mourned your loss of each other. While your clay selves wandered for thousands of years through the universe, your longing for each other never faded. This metaphor helps to explain how in the moment of friendship two souls suddenly recognize each other. It could be a meeting on the street, or at a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is the flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing. Love opens the door of ancient recognition. You enter. You come home to each other at last. As Euripides said, "Two friends, one soul.
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  2. John O'Donohue _ To Bless the Space Between Us:

    Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day the blueprint of your life would begin to glow on earth, illuminating all the faces and voices that would arrive to invite your soul to growth. Praised be your father and mother, who loved you before you were, and trusted to call you here with no idea who you would be. Blessed be those who have loved you into becoming who you were meant to be, blessed be those who have crossed your life with dark gifts of hurt and loss that have helped to school your mind in the art of disappointment. When desolation surrounded you, blessed be those who looked for you and found you, their kind hands urgent to open a blue window in the gray wall formed around you. Blessed be the gifts you never notice, your health, eyes to behold the world, thoughts to countenance the unknown, memory to harvest vanished days, your heart to feel the world's waves, your breath to breathe the nourishment of distance made intimate by earth. On this echoing-day of your birth, may you open the gift of solitude in order to receive your soul; enter the generosity of silence to hear your hidden heart; know the serenity of stillness to be enfolded anew by the miracle of your being.
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  3. John O'Donohue _ Eternal Echoes: Celtic

    The soul is always wiser than the mind, even though we are dependent on the mind to read the soul for us.
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  4. John O'Donohue _ Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic

    Sometimes when a friendship is in trouble, it is not to be healed by endless analysis or counseling. You need to change the rhythm of seeing each other and come in contact again with the ancient belonging that brought you together. If you invoke its power and presence around you, this ancient affinity will hold you together. Two people who are really awakened inhabit the one circle of belonging. They have awakened a more ancient force around them that will hold them together and mind them."
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  5. John O'Donohue _ Eternal Echoes: Celtic

    In the beginning was the dream...In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened.Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed...If we take Nature as the great artist, then all presences in theworld have emerged from her mind and imagination. We arechildren of the earth's dreaming. It's almost as if Nature is indream and we are her children who have broken through thedawn into time and place. Fashioned in the dreaming of theclay, we are always somehow haunted by that; we are unableever finally to decide what is dream and what is reality. Eachday we live in what we call reality, yet life seems to resemblea dream. We rush through our days in such stress and intensity,as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the worlddepended on us. We worry and grow anxious - we magnifytrivia until they become important enough to control our lives.Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporarysojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowlyin the infinite night of the cosmos...{.....}There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream.What we consider real is often precariously dream-like.Our grip on reality is tenuous...
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  6. John O'Donohue _ Walking in Wonder: Eternal

    A lot of experiences that we have in the world are torn, broken, hard experiences, and in broken, difficult, lonesome experiences you earn a quality of light that is very precious. I often think of it as quarried light.
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  7. John O'Donohue _ Walking in Wonder: Eternal

    If you go out for several hours into a place that is wild, your mind begins to slow down, down, down. What is happening is that the clay of your body is retrieving its own sense of sisterhood with the great clay of the landscape.
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  8. John O'Donohue _ Walking in Wonder: Eternal

    Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than their facts.
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  9. John O'Donohue _ Walking in Wonder: Eternal

    I don't believe that death comes at the end of a life. I believe your death was there at your birth with you. It was the unknown presence. Every step of the road of your life that you take, your death is beside you.
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  10. John O'Donohue _ Walking in Wonder: Eternal

    I feel that fear is negative wonder. It is the point at which wonder begins to consume itself and scrape off the essence of things.
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  11. John O'Donohue _ Walking in Wonder: Eternal

    One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become chief executive of the project you call your life, to have reverence always for the immensity that is inside you.
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  12. John O'Donohue _ Eternal Echoes

    There is a desperate hunger for belonging. People feel isolated and cut off. Perhaps this is why a whole nation can assemble around the images of celebrities. They have no acquaintance with these celebrities personally. They look at them from a distance and project all their longings onto them. When something happens to a celebrity, they feel as if it is happening to themselves. There is an acute need for the reawakening of the sense of community.
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