I sigh when I read this book. About every three paragraphs I close my eyes and shake my head in awe, as if to say to the gods of philosophy and poetry, Thank you for this man! This is a diamond blessing of a book that has become one of my favourite gifts to give. It will cause you to find and heed that naturally deep ache for beauty in your life. John O’Donohue will have you believing that beauty is a colossal force for transformation that is waiting in our personal and collective shadows. I believe. I believe.

7 reasons to buy yourself and your favourite friend a copy of John O’Donohue’s Beauty, in the words of the master poet himself:

We live between the act of awakening of the act of surrender.

In a sense, all the contemporary crises can be reduced to a crisis about the nature of beauty. This perspective offers us new possibilities. Perhaps, for the first time. we gain a clear view of how much ugliness we endure and allow. The media generate relentless images of mediocrity and ugliness in talk-shows, tapestries of smothered language and frenetic gratification. The media are becoming the global mirror and these shows enshrine the ugly as the normal standard.

Could it be possible that a landscape could have a deep friendship with you? Perhaps your favourite place feels proud of you…it will miss your voice, your breath and the bright waves of your thought, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places.

Colour is the clothing of beauty.

No-one wants to remain a prisoner of an unlived life.

The imagination has a deep sense of irony.

The who-ness of someone can never be finally named, known, claimed, controlled or predicted. The who is beyond all frames and frontiers and dwells in the mystery of its own reflexivity and infinity. Who has no map. … Beauty is the inconceivable made so intimate that it illuminates our hearts.