David Whyte quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by David Whyte

David Whyte Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from David Whyte on Wise Famous Quotes.

Wanting soul life without the dark, warming intelligence of personal doubt is like expecting an egg without the brooding heat of the mother hen.

I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.

Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine.

Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.

But then we always knew heaven would be a desperate place. Everything you desired coming in one fearful moment to greet you.

Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

We're moving toward the kind of work world which has less security. But we hope it has more creativity and possibility of real engagement.

We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again

Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown.

Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.

Genius is becoming something you were all along.

Poetry: Language against which we have no defences.

The antidote to exhaustion isn't rest.
It's wholeheartedness.

The lost sense that we play out our lives as part of a greater story

We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief.

The moment you've uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you're already turning towards home.

Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human.

We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.

One small thing
I've learned these years,
how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness
how to be found by the world.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.

Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.

Heartbreak is how we mature ... There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.

There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.

It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with, it is the mother of the thing you fear. The very thing that has given birth to the nightmare.

The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.

What you plan is too small for you to live.

The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.

A soul-based workplace asks things of me that I didn't even know I had. It's constantly telling me that I belong to something large in the world.

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

If in your mind it was possible to take a year's sabbatical from work to reassess your life, what would you do and where would you go?

Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.

But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside

What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds Except the one in which you belong.

I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing.

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

Let the apple ripen
on the branch
beyond your need
to take it down.

I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.

Shyness means you are in the hallway of a greater presence. You just don't know how to take the conversation another step. It's a lovely indication.

Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.

The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.

Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.

What I have not seen
or failed to see
I leave as a gift.

Work and life are not separate things and therefore cannot be balanced against each other except to create further trouble.

It is difficult to be creative and enthusiastic about anything for which we do not feel affection.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.

The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears

What if the world is holding its breath -
waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?

The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.

Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.

To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

There is no house like the house of belonging.

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.

Sometimes you have to make a complete disaster of your life in such an epic way that it will be absolutely clear to you what you've been doing.

Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.

The greatest luxury of having money should be not having to worry about it.

Poetry is a break for freedom.

The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality.

Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.

Walking the roads is enough today, I'll follow the dark line of receding sun

Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.

Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don't mistake other people's questions for your own.

The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.

Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.

What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.