John O’Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

I think you see that the gifts that are given to us as individuals are not for us alone, or for our own self-improvement, but they’re actually for the community and to be offered.

music is what language would love to be, if it could

beauty is not a luxury

there is very little time or attention given to what you could almost call learning the art of inwardness; or a pedagogy of interiority. That’s why I find the aesthetic things, like poetry, fiction, good film, theater, drama, dance, and music, actually awaken that inside you and remind you that there is a huge interiority within you.

I think this is one of the key things in parenting, and the difficulty of raising children in a very, very fast-moving culture: that, again, it’s the difficulty of creating a space where children can actually unfold and where they can be truly accompanied in their journey

stress is a perverted relationship to time, so that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine

Tippett:

What do you mean when you write that everyone is an artist?

O’Donohue:

I mean that everyone is involved, whether they like it or not, in the construction of their world. So it’s never as given as it actually looks; you’re always shaping it and building it. And I feel that from that perspective, that each of us is an artist.

One way — and I think this is a really lovely way, and I think it’s an interesting question to ask oneself, too. And the question is, when is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture? But when had you last a great conver... See more