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User:Darren J. Prior

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Malin Head, Co. Donegal (2024)
Celtic triple spiral symbol

About me

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I have an undergraduate Higher Diploma and a BA in Journalism. I am involved with Near FM and work in the Community, Voluntary and Development Sectors in general. While I am based in Dublin I cover a lot of national and international issues and interview people from across Ireland and not infrequently people based outside the country too.


Hansfield, Clonsilla, Dublin 15, Ireland.

Páirc Hans, Cluain Saileach, Baile Átha Cliath 15, Éire.



Pages I have started on Wikiquote (2024-2025):

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Quotes added below:

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Muhammad Ali

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  • We all have the same God, we just serve him differently. Rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, oceans all have different names, but they all contain water. So do religions have different names, and they all contain truth, expressed in different ways forms and times. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew. When you believe in God, you should believe that all people are part of one family. If you love God, you can’t love only some of his children.
    • Muhammad Ali with Hana Yasmeen Ali, The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Life’s Journey, Simon & Schuster (2004).
  • I’m the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was.
  • God gave me Parkinson’s syndrome to show me I’m not the greatest — He is.
    • Muhammad Ali Interview (various appearances, 1990s–2000s).
  • Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth.
  • Don’t count the days — make the days count.
  • God is watching me. God doesn’t praise me because I beat Joe Frazier… God looks at the heart.
    • Muhammad Ali Interview around the time of Thrilla in Manila.
  • A man who has no imagination has no wings.

Dr. Nicole LePera

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  • The only person who can save you, is you.
    • Nicole LePera, Nicole's SelfHealers Circe social media (9th February 2025).
  • Research shows about 15% of the population have the ability to self reflect. Even fewer have the ability to solve conflict and emotionally regulate. Don’t take people’s lack of emotional skills, personally. It’s rarely about us— even when it feels good to believe it is. Freeing yourself from taking things personally allows you to set boundaries, not drown in shame, and to stop trying to fix what you didn’t break.
  • We’ve been conditioned to look for authority figures to give us permission or show us what’s right for us. The greatest authority is your own intuition.
    • Nicole LePera, Nicole's SelfHealers Circe social media (18th July 2025).
  • To heal your mind, you must also heal your gut.
    • Nicole LePera, Nicole's SelfHealers Circe social media (18th July 2025).
  • Someone needs to hear this: you can’t regulate your nervous system in a toxic relationship.
  • We’re at a time in human history where people are finally educated on healing, trauma, and healthy family dynamics. Some dismiss this as “pop psychology” others will use the information to break the cycle and build the life they deserve.
  • The best mental health intervention for children is emotionally available parents.
  • When someone gives you mixed signals, what they’re actually saying is: "I don’t know myself."
  • Normalize not making little girls hug anyone. Let them say no. Teach them it’s ok to not want to be touched, to need space, and to choose who they share affection with.
  • Let this generation stop the performance.
  • People do not have an "addictive personality," they struggle to self soothe.
  • Mother Nature is the best therapist on earth.
  • Social media is now how a majority of people self soothe.
  • What’s ruining relationships these days: unrealistic expectations and unresolved childhood trauma.
  • Life requires vision.
  • Seeing your past clearly. Seeing who you actually are clearly. And making choices in alignment with what you want.
  • Most people are blind, sleep walking through life, making unconscious choices.
  • You have to be willing to see.
  • True love is consistent.
  • Question: What do you think is the biggest problem of current millennial generation?
  • Nicole: The same problem as every generation: lack of authentic connection to self.
  • Remove people from meaning in their lives. From their families most of the day. Put them in intensely stressful financial situations where they can easily numb with processed food, alcohol, or drugs and of course people are depressed.
  • People are responding to a sick culture.
  • People are waking up to the reality that our emotional health matters. Burnout isn’t something to work through. Obsessive achievement feels empty. Deep relationships, intimate moments, and shared experiences are the future.
  • We want evolution.
  • Our wounds become our demons when we refuse to acknowledge them.
  • When people can’t control you, they’ll create a story about you. Take a deep breath and remember who you are. Put no energy into false narratives. The truth will one day speak for itself.
  • It is manipulation. So many people think manipulation is this terrible, evil thing. It’s simply an attempt to get a need met in a dysfunctional way.
  • Question: What is your personal philosophy, in 3 words or less?
  • Nicole: Consciously create life.
  • The less you cater to a system that wants us to betray ourselves, the more people will be committed to misunderstanding you.
  • This isn’t a sign to conform.
  • It’s a sign you’re getting free.
  • Bullies are typically wounded people with extremely low self worth. Healthy people who have things going on in their lives don’t bully other people. What we need in society is inspired people creating things and sharing ideas.
  • We have a depressed collective because we’re not told how important it is to paint, write, and make things. Without creativity humans go into survival mode.

Rumi / Rūmī

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  • Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.
    • Book 6 (Daftar-e Sheshom) of the Masnavi.

John O'Donohue quotes

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  • We were created to be creators.
  • It is ironic that so often we continue to live like paupers though our inheritance of spirit is so vast.
  • One of the great modern philosophers of beauty, Immanuel Kant, spoke of the joy we take in the Beautiful as 'disinterested delight'. The animation of the Beautiful is so immediate and fulfilling that we simply enjoy it for itself; it never occurs to us to ask what purpose it serves.
  • In contrast to how a child belongs in the world, adult belonging is never as natural, innocent, or playful. Adult belonging has to be chosen, received, and renewed. It is a lifetime's work.
    • John O'Donohue Eternal Echoes – Exploring Our Hunger To Belong (2011)

Dr. M. Scott Peck quotes

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  • There is no virtue inherent in unconstructive suffering. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. If we can be open to learning from our pain, then we are truly growing; if we merely wallow in it, we are not.
    • M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster / Touchstone, 1998 ed. [orig. 1978]), Part I – “Discipline,” p. 63.
  • If all the energy required to think seems troublesome, the lack of thinking causes far more trouble and conflict for ourselves as individuals and for the society in which we live.
  • The spirit of evil is one of unreality, but it itself is real. To think otherwise is to be misled.
  • Evil is actively opposed to love. It is not laziness but militant refusal. It is anti-love.
  • It is important to realize that cults are a dime a dozen and that a great many businesses are cults.
  • One of the major dilemmas we face both as individuals and as a society is simplistic thinking – or the failure to think at all. It is not just a problem, it is the problem.
  • Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.
  • In any case, in Vietnam it was the extraordinary power of nationalism, not communism, that brought the United States to its knees. To oppose legitimate nationalism is to do so at our peril.
  • Evil may be thought of as a failure to complete the Oedipal process, a failure to develop humility in the face of authority.
  • The successful resolution of the Oedipal situation permits the growth of love beyond the family; failure to resolve it results in dependency, narcissism, and immaturity in one’s capacity to love.
  • Most people, because they have not successfully resolved the Oedipal stage, remain emotionally children; they are afraid to grow up, afraid to risk independence, afraid to risk real love.
  • My favorite definition of evil is that it is militant ignorance.
  • Evil is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And because we are all to some extent lazy, and all to some extent narcissistic, we are all to some extent evil.
  • The mystery of goodness is greater than that of evil.
    • M. Scott Peck The Road Less Travelled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety. Page 271, Simon & Schuster (1997).
  • The individual with a secular consciousness essentially thinks that he is the center of the universe. Such people tend to be quite intelligent. They know full well that they are but one of six billion human beings scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet that is a small fragment of a tiny solar system within a galaxy among countless galaxies, and that each of those other human beings also thinks that he is the center of the universe. Consequently, intelligent though they may be, people with a secular consciousness are prone to feel a bit lost within this hugeness and, despite their "centrality," to often experience a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance.
  • The person with a sacred consciousness, on the other hand, does not think of himself as the center of the universe. For him the center resides elsewhere, specifically in God — in the Sacred. Yet despite this lack of centrality, he is actually less likely to feel himself insignificant or meaningless than the secularist is, because he sees himself existing in relationship with that Sacred Other, and it is from this relationship that he derives his meaning and significance.
  • Sometimes people fall in between, with one foot planted in sacred consciousness and the other in secular consciousness...

Edward Mannix

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  • Spiritual people must sometimes be spiritual warriors.
    • Edward Mannix (2011). Reinventing Truth. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 1456579452. 

Sadhguru

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  • Without the necessary energy, being aware is extremely difficult.
  • Human beings who do not break their self-created boundaries will remain trapped in them.
    • Sadhguru, Daily Quote - Isha Foundation website (February 13 2017).
  • Prejudice is poison, fed to us from an early age by our families, religions and societies.
  • There is no need to aspire to greatness. If you go beyond concerns of 'what about me,' you will anyway be a great human being.
  • Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you.” Yoga is about experiencing it.
  • Success will come easy once you function at your full potential.
  • The important thing is not that people love you but that you are loving.
  • The best thing you can do for your family, your children, society, and the world around you is to enhance yourself.
  • Life is about Consciousness – not concerns, compulsions, or conflict. May the coming months bring the profoundness of human existence that leads to a blissful life.
  • If somebody is hurting and it does not hurt you at all, that means you have forsaken your humanity.
  • When people live together without understanding each other, their survival instinct turns everything into a fight.
  • Education should not be about molding children the way you want them, but about supporting their natural longing to know and blossom.
  • When you are able to create yourself the way you want, you can craft your Destiny the way you want as well.
  • Genius is not individual. Genius is that dimension of life which is the source of creation which is there in a seed form in every human being. Whether we will create the atmosphere to unlock that or we will keep it supressed, is what the parents can do or not do. Please in some way let their (children) genius unfold.

Gary Zukav

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  • Lakota wisdom declares that the center of the universe is everywhere.
  • That is correct.
  • The center of the universe is in you.
  • It is in me.
  • Creating authentic power transforms you from a victim in your life to a creator of your life.
  • Authentic power is the alignment of the personality with the soul.
    • Gary Zukav, Official social media (2018) also stated in his book The Seat of the Soul.
  • The creation of authentic power requires that you distinguish between your artificial needs and your authentic needs.
  • As you become authentically powerful, you become the authority in your life.
  • Authentic power is a potential. To bring it into being, you have work to do.

Hazrat Ali / Ali bin Abi Talib

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  • Being ungrateful for a blessing causes it to be taken away.
    • Ali, Nahj al-Balagha.

Dr. Carl Jung

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  • But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.
    • Carl Jung Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
  • It occurred to him (Carl Jung) that it was perhaps no accident that we traditionally referred to alcoholic drinks as ‘spirits’, and that perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, and that perhaps alcoholism was a spiritual disorder or, better yet, a spiritual condition.
    • M. Scott Peck, Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Toward Spiritual Growth. New York: Simon & Schuster (Touchstone), (1993). Section where Peck discusses Carl Jung and the origins of Alcoholics Anonymous – page number depends on edition.)

Fintan O'Toole

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  • Too many journalists, fixated as they are on today's events, have a weak sense of history.
    • Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times (2023).
  • Fandom and journalism make bad bedfellows.
    • Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times (2023)
  • Maybe the penny will finally drop ... that the best case for a united Ireland is a State that proves itself capable of making the island one of the best places in the world, not just to invest, but to live and work. What might attract a corporate board in California and a skilled worker from Spain just might do the same for a Protestant in Ballymena.
    • Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times, 2023
  • Brute force ... does not go well with ignorance.
    • Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times (2022)
  • By 1948, the year Ireland became a republic, both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael "claimed as a priority the revival of the Irish language as the vernacular of the people – and both equally did nothing to stop the death of Irish-speaking communities like that on the Blaskets".
    • Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves, page 3 (2021).

Muhammad Yunus

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  • ... Culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

Sarah Carey

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  • Both (Eoghan) Daltun and (Ray) Ó Foghlú argue that we consider barren mountain a normal part of the Irish landscape. It isn’t. The mountains should be covered in rainforest.
    • Sarah Carey, The Irish Independent (2023)
  • I conducted a little survey of government websites. I asked for page view numbers for English and Irish versions for some pages I picked at random.
  • All figures are for January 2025.
  • A HSE page about treating Covid-19 symptoms at home had 5,274 views in English and 23 in Irish.
  • A Department of Health page on the menopause had 337 views in English and four in Irish.
  • A Department of Social Welfare page about the fuel allowance for pensioners was viewed 13,892 times in English and twice in Irish.
  • A Department of Education page on guidelines for school designs had 1,007 views in English and two in Irish.
    • Sarah Carey, The Irish Independent (2025)[1].
  • Will we – as I think we should – abolish all school patronage, or does everyone get to keep their preferred social and educational ghettos?
    • Sarah Carey, The Irish Independent (2025) [2].

Penelope Quest

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  • The term Reiki Master was a rough translation of Sensei, meaning respected teacher. In reality, no one can 'master' Reiki, because it is a divine energy, so in essence being a 'Reiki Master' means following a spiritual path towards self-mastery; this can be a physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually demanding healing journey, although of course it can also be very rewarding.
    • Penelope Quest (2003). Self-Healing with Reiki- How to Create Wholeness, Harmony & Balance for Body, Mind & Spirit. Piatkus. ISBN 978-0749929725. 

Pádraig Ó Cuanacháin

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  • Tá léarscáileanna sa teanga dhúchais ar fáil i ngach tír a bhfuil féinmheas acu orthu féin.
    • Translation: Every self-respecting country has their own language on their maps.
    • Pádraig Ó Cuanacháin, Gael-Taca – Quoted in English in The Sunday Times (Ireland) in 2005. [3]
  • An t-aon fhadhb atá agamsa ná easpa tuisceanna i measc na heagraíochtaí Gaeilge mar gheall ar thábhacht cúrsaí margaíochta.
    • Translation: The only problem I have is the lack of understanding among the Irish-language organisations regarding the importance of marketing.
    • Pádraig Ó Cuanacháin, Gael-Taca – Speaking on RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta in 2007[4].
  • Viewing the more traditional Irish language revival organisations as too narrow and conservative, he felt they had failed to sell Irish to people at grassroots level.
    • Obituary in The Irish Times about Pádraig Ó Cuanacháin a few months after his death in 2008[5].

J.J. Lee

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  • The failure, however, did not lie mainly in the schools. It was the blatant failure of the state itself to devise arrangements for the subsequent use of the language that largely discredited compulsory Irish. The children were given no incentive to master Irish as a living language, only as a dead one. The charade of Irish language tests for public employment, when everybody knew the language would hardly ever be used again, the whole fetid system of favouritism associated with language knowledge, as distinct from language use, inevitably left its mark, stamping the most idealistic and most important task undertaken by the new state as yet one more sleazy political racket. Genuine language lovers who ‘loathed the way that the politicians, the pedagogues, the urbanised peasants had sucked the life and beauty from it’ were brushed aside.
    • J. J. Lee, Ireland: 1912–1985 – Politics and Society (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 670.

Neale Donald Walsch

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  • Life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation.
    • Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1. Chapter 11, page 26-27 (1996).
  • The reason for your soul's having come to the body is to evolve. That is, to become a grander and grander version of itself.
  • This is the purpose of your life on earth, and of life everywhere.
    • Neale Donald Walsch, The New Revelations, page 152 (2002).
  • By that which you call evil do you define yourself – and by that which you call good. The biggest evil would therefore be to declare nothing evil at all.
    • Neale Donald Walsch, Conversation with God: Book One (1996).
  • A lot of people are going to want you to think that you are your yesterdays. In fact, some people are going to insist that you be. They will do this because they have a big investment in your continuing to show up that way. For one thing, they can then be "right" about you.
    • Neale Donald Walsch, Friendship with God: An Uncommon Dialogue Chapter 8 (1999).
  • You will be both worshiped and reviled, elevated and denigrated, honored and crucified.
    • Conversations with God – Book 3. Hampton Roads Publishing Company. 1998. ISBN 978-1571741035. 

Deidré Wallace

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Albert Einstein

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  • Great moral teachers of humanity were, in a certain sense, geniuses in the art of living more than in the art of thinking.

Bob Proctor

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  • The absence of good habits can be just as destructive as a bad habit.
  • Create the habit of study into your everyday life.

Lillian Glass

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  • Toxic people get their power from your reaction.
  • They feed on your anger and fear.
  • They thrive on guilt.
  • If you remain calm and refuse to react, you cut off their supply of energy.
    • Lillian Glass — Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable Chapter 3: “Recognizing Energy Vampires" page 45-46 (1995)

Denis O'Brien

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  • (The Irish State is) “complicit in facilitating global tax avoidance” ... "This is perfectly legal and within OECD rules. But the question is: is it acceptable? It is modern day digital colonialism.
  • The system is contributing to gross inequality and is the main reason why African immigrants take huge risks in dinghies to reach rich European countries.
    • Denis O’Brien (2025), part of speech quoted in The Irish Times, [11 November 2025], talking about the Irish State's alleged complicity in global tax avoidance by large US technology companies in Africa and other countries[6].

Dennis Tourish

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  • Cults prey upon our aversion to uncertainty.
    • Dennis Tourish (2003). Book - On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left - Chapter - “Ideological Intransigence, Democratic Centralism and Cultism: A Case Study - The CWI”. Original article - What Next? (magazine) No. 27[7].

Anthony de Mello

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  • The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change.
    • Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love (1991).
  • Almost every negative emotion you experience is the direct outcome of of an attachment.
    • Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love (1991).
  • Spirituality means waking up.
    • Anthony de Mello, Awareness (1990).
  • There is nothing more practical than spirituality.
    • Anthony de Mello, Awareness (1990).

Quotes with unverified original sources

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  • There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.
    • Quote attributed to Desmond Tutu - no definite original source located according to ChatGPT.
  • He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.
    • Quote attributed to Muhammad Ali - no definite original source located according to ChatGPT.
  • What you’re thinking is what you’re becoming.
    • Quote attributed to Muhammad Ali - no definite original source located according to ChatGPT although verions of the same existed long before Muhammad is reported to have said it.
  • Here’s an easy way to figure out if you’re in a cult: If you’re wondering whether you’re in a cult, the answer is yes.
    • Quote attributed to Stephen Colbert - no definite original source located according to ChatGPT.
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