Walking in Wonder Quotes

“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.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot sense the shape of ourselves any more.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“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.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second, then decide what to do with your time.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its path.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Meister Eckhart said that nothing in the universe resembles God so much as silence, so if you think about silence in that sense, then to come into silence is to come into the presence of the Divine. In a way, you allow yourself to be enfolded by that stillness. In a real sense, the deepest thing in a human heart is not the verbiage but is actually that still silence—not the silence of Buddhism, which often seems to me maybe something anonymous—but is the silence of intimacy where no word is needed and where a word would actually be a fracture.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that everyone is ripping off second hand thinking. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm and bring us home, and also challenge us.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“There is incredible symmetry in a tree, between its inner life and its outer life,between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and down at once and produces enough branches too incarnate it’s wild divinity. It doesn’t limit itself- it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one kind of seamless movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“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.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“I think that we are infinitely greater than our minds and we are infinitely more than our images of ourselves. One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts. We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man in Connemara said one time to a friend of mine, Beidh”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“I have learned myself painfully that you can only relate to someone if you somehow have the courage and the need to inhabit your own solitude. You can only relate out of your separateness, otherwise you are just using the other person to shield you from your own solitude.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man once said to a friend of mine in Gaelic, ‘we’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have short exposure.’ You have to begin to transfigure your fear...at the end of your life, when death comes, it won’t be some kind of monster, but it can actually be a friend who hides the most truthful image of your soul.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“There was a contest in Ancient Greece to find out who could write a sentence that would somehow always be true. The sentence that won the competition was “This too shall pass.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“One of the most exciting and energizing forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a though that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways of wonder.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“FOR A NEW BEGINNING

In out of the way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you have outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from the earth and now walking on the normal landscape.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“feel that old age and aging is a time of great gathering, a time of sifting and a time of reaping the rewards of forgotten and neglected experience.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“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.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“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.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Our age is also very functional. There are goals and purposes and programs for everything. The lovely thing about Eckhart is his absolute suspicion of the program. People got hooked on a program which became an end in itself. Our world today is haunted and obsessed by functional thinking which sees everything in terms of a process. Eckhart keeps God and the mystical way totally free of that thinking. He says that God is God and without a why: non habet quare; Ipsum est quare omnium et omnibus—He is the why of everything and to everything. A later follower of Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, wrote a beautiful short mystical poem called “Ohne Warum” (Without Why): The rose is without why She blooms because she blooms She does not care for herself Asks not if she is seen One of the beautiful things in Eckhart is the idea of letting things be. So many people wonder what they should do, how they should work. For Eckhart, none of this matters. The most important thing to focus on is how you should be. That is really mindfulness of presence. All intimacy, love, belonging, creativity is not when the grubby little hands of our functional minds get into the mystery, but when we stand back and let the mystery be, become enveloped in it so that it extends us and deepens us. Finally, Eckhart has the lovely idea of Gelassenheit. Gelassen is the German for “calmness.” Even when things go against you and the rhythm in your life takes you to awkward and lonely places, you can still maintain a stillness which is in your soul and will connect you and give you an inviolable belonging and togetherness. You won’t get that from a program but you can awaken it in your own heart. For Presence”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“The art of disappearing certainly has its own kind of value. In a strange way, in modern society we seem to be inhabiting the world of absence more than presence through the whole world of technology and virtual reality. Very often it seems that the driven nature of contemporary society is turning us into the ultimate harvesters of absence, that is, ghosts in our own lives.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“And here are we, even if we are old, we still have time, and time is always full of possibility. It would really be a great gift that an old person could give to themselves, the gift of recognizing the possibilities that are in that time, and to use their imagination. The imagination is the gateway to a full life, and people who awaken their imagination come in to a force field of possibility and there are doors opening everywhere. I think it is unknown what you can do if you begin to see it.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty says the body is not an object to think about. Rather, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings, which move towards equilibrium.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Landscape has a soul and a presence, and landscape- living in the mode of silence is always wrapped in seamless prayer.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Imagination according to William Blake is about the awakening to and recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that there is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“One of the questions that John loved to pose was “when was your last great conversation with someone?” Good conversation chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade, and it penetrates the depths so as to soar unto unfolding possibility.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“an authentic life is a life that is aware of and willing to engage its own oppositions, and honorably inhabits that threshold where the light and darkness, the masculine and feminine and all the beginnings and endings of one’s life engage.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World