John O'Donohue Quotes

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

Every living person and thing responds to beauty. We all thirst for it. We receive strength and renewal by seeing stirring and satisfying sites.

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.

What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

What makes people the world over stand in line for Van Gogh is not that they will see beautiful pictures but that in an indefinable way they will come away feeling better human beings. And that is exactly what Van Gogh hoped for.

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

Art is inspiring. Walking into a gallery, or when the lights go up on a stage; that thrill of getting something that has nothing to do with acquisition.

Beauty is whatever gives joy.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic

You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty.

Poetry, Painting & Music, the three Powers in man of conversing with Paradise, which the flood did not sweep away.

Beautiful jewelry, a beautiful room - that's what museums are - a beautiful painting, a beautiful face, it makes you feel good to look at, and that's a beautiful thing.

As a breath of wind or some echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns to the source from which it issued, so the stream of beauty passes back into its possessor through his eyes, which is its natural route to the soul; arriving there and setting him all aflutter, it waters the passages of the feathers and causes the wings to grow, and fills the soul of the loved one in his turn with love.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.