We study the generation of low-energy couplings induced by quantum fluctuations within the O(4)-symmetric quark-meson model. To this end, we compute the functional renormalization group flow of the linearly realized quark-meson model including higher-derivative interactions and subsequently transform the resulting effective action into a nonlinear effective pion action. The latter is referred to as the low-energy limit of the O(4) quark-meson model. The present study may be considered as a preparatory work for the dynamical generation of low-energy couplings from functional QCD fluctuations in order to determine meaningful renormalization scales for purely pionic models.