Celtic Spirituality Quotes

“The human heart is a theater of longing.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

“We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

“Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. ... It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

“Many questing young people and stressed older people nowadays seek relaxation through meditation. They look for it in Hindu, Buddhist and other Eastern religions. They are often surprised to learn that there is such a way within the Christian tradition, a way that is known as contemplation.”
― Ray Simpson, Exploring Celtic Spirituality

“Contemplative prayer is natural, unprogrammed; it is perpetual openness to God, so that in the openness his concerns can flow in and out of our minds as he wills.”
― Ray Simpson, Exploring Celtic Spirituality

“You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

“Entering into and opening to our inherent spacious soul daily allows a natural liberation of our manifold self-identifications to occur, and it is then that we can truly rest in the sacredness and come to know our ground of being. The great Celtic writer John O’Donohue points to this when he says that “behind the façade of your life, there is something beautiful and eternal happening.”
― Meghan Don, The New Divine Feminine: Spiritual Evolution for a Woman's Soul

“Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

“This breakage within us is what makes us human and vulnerable. There is nothing more sinister than someone whose mind seems to be an absolute circle; there is a helpless coldness and a deadly certainty about such a presence.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

“O’ Cernunnos, with antler crown,
you rid us all of the ungrateful kind with new
life sown, amongst the moss, we’ve lain down
to weep, diolch for the peace of mind,
the pain you have (for centuries) known,
hir yw pob ymaros, in wake and sleep,
we knew you’d return to us!”
― Lavinia Valeriana, Adrift in Acheron

“The Chattering Season by Stewart Stafford

Hear a fearsome banshee's wail,
From a dank bog or Celtic dale,
Like the pulling of the rat's tail,
In the whistle of a thrashing gale.

In this skittish son of Mc's room,
A death knell tolls out his doom,
A cursed shadow now does loom,
Her spirit bride's unwilling groom.

The stark evening's grim messenger,
She's a maelstrom's fatal passenger,
Howls from last breath's harbinger,
No dowry for this eternal dowager.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Change is the only constant, a star in the snow.”
― Bibiana Krall, Mont Pelier

“The Celtic Sufi, Sonnet

Oh, you take the fancy road,
I'll take the lowly road,
and I'll be in heartland,
while you charge your phone,

where me and my true heart
never ever part ways,
where me and my backbone,
never bend in dismay,

where me and my scruples
never give in to convenience,
where me and my fervent dream
succumb to no pride of the dead,

if you alight from your high horse,
with a gleaming heart I wait for thee,
join me one day for a cup of tea,
on the bonnie loch of liberty.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“Fiona MacLeod provided a particular and peculiar atmosphere of twilit gloom, grim despair, and beauty laden with defeat. Despite the theatrical props and pretences, he was not making it all up, but articulating a genuine psychic affliction. The manner is both excessive and limiting - poetry which continually recreates a single mood by means of a litany of repeated words such as 'sorrow', 'beauty', 'grey', 'old', 'dream', 'pale' and 'sighing'. In one essay Fiona describes the Celtic spirit as a 'rapt pleasure in what is ancient and in the contemplation of what holds an indwelling melancholy; a visionary passion for beauty, which is of the immortal things beyond the temporary beauty of what is mutable and mortal...' Apart from the prose itself, which seems blown up with a bicycle pump, I'm nor sure if he knows what he means. What are these 'immortal things'? One sharp definition would destroy the misty fabric altogether.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction