John O'Donohue Soul Quotations

The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere - in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion, and in ourselves. No one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.

Either we are in the universe to inhabit the eternity of our souls and grow real, or else we might as well dedicate our days to shopping and kill time watching talk-shows,

Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul.

All through your life your soul takes care of you...your soul is alive and awakened, gathering, sheltering and guiding your ways and days in the world. In effect, your soul is your secret shelter. ♥

When you had an ‘anam cara,’ (soul friend), your friendship cut across all convention and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul.

When you listen with your soul, you come into rhythm and unity with the music of the universe.

The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. We avoid it or quell it by filtering it through our protective barriers of domestication and control. The normal way never leads home.

When you are compassionate with yourself, you trust in your soul, which you let guide your life. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny better than do.

Your soul knows the geography of your destiny.

In our rapid and externalized world, language has become ghostlike, abbreviated to code and label. Words that would mirror the soul carry the loam of substance and the shadow of the divine. The sense of silence and darkness behind the words in more ancient cultures, particularly in folk culture, is absent in the modern use of language. Language is full of acronyms; nowadays we are impatient of words that carry with them histories and associations.

To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.

You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul, there will be a youthfulness in you that no one will be able to take away from you.

Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuristic eye of a neon culture. Real intimacy is of the soul, and the soul is reserved.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul. May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light and renewal to those Who work with you and to those who see and receive your work. May your work never weary you.

To understand the harvest of your soul against the background of seasonal rhythm should give you a sense of quiet delight at the arrival of this time in your life. It should give you strength and a sense of how the deeper belonging of your soul-world will be revealed to you.

May your soul calm, console and renew you.

Everything in the world of soul has a deep desire and longing for visible form; this is exactly where the power of the imagination lives.

Even though life may have moved wearily and painfully through such a person, they have still managed not to let it corrode their soul. In such a face a lovely luminosity shines out into the world. It casts a tender light that radiates a sense of wholeness and wholesomeness.

The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown

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

Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.

When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.

You lose the balance of your sould if you not learn to take care of yourself.

Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment.

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.

Yet we do not need to put any strain on our longing. If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us.