Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by David Whyte, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring David Whyte quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 136 David Whyte quotes for you to read and share.

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A good poem has its own life. It's like bringing a child into the world. You, the poet, birthed the child, but the child will surprise you continually. I think a work of art has its own aliveness, its own future. -- David Whyte
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If I don't have time for the writing, it's because I'm not making that time. It's really just a question of whether you want to or not, whether you feel you deserve to write or not. -- David Whyte
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We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due. -- David Whyte
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See, even if you're stuck in life, if you can describe just exactly the way you're stuck, then you will immediately recognise that you can't go on that way anymore. So, just saying precisely, writing precisely how you're stuck, or how you're alienated, opens up a door of freedom for you. -- David Whyte
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The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own. -- David Whyte
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The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance... -- David Whyte
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No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. -- David Whyte
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Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom. -- David Whyte
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Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends. -- David Whyte
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When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting. -- David Whyte
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To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life; fully experienced, it turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past. -- David Whyte
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It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life. -- David Whyte
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The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body. -- David Whyte
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To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter's face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. -- David Whyte
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For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years. -- David Whyte
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There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from. -- David Whyte
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Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. -- David Whyte
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When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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The greatest luxury of having money should be not having to worry about it. -- David Whyte
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Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed. -- David Whyte
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We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel. -- David Whyte
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To give generously but appropriately and then, most difficult of all, and as the full apotheosis of the art, with feeling, in the moment and spontaneously, has always been recognized as one of the greatest of human qualities. -- David Whyte
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Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation. -- David Whyte
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Lion sounds that have not grown from the mouse may exude naked power ... but cannot convey any wisdom or understanding ... The initial steps on the path to courageous speech then are the first tentative steps into the parts of us that cannot speak. -- David Whyte
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To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible - that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins. -- David Whyte
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What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire
what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need. -- David Whyte
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Jane Austen never did marry. Why doesthat statement call for such reflexive pity? It carries a diferent meaning if we follow it up: Jane Austen never did marry, and therefore she was given the time and perspective to produce books as well-written as those by anyone who ever lived.
-David Whyte -- David Whyte
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To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence. -- David Whyte
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The lost sense that we play out our lives as part of a greater story -- David Whyte
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A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away. -- David Whyte
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A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want. -- David Whyte
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Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world. This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's. -- David Whyte
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There are many tough conversations, but one of the most difficult is between a parent and an adolescent daughter, partly because as a parent we are almost always attempting to relate to someone who is no longer there. -- David Whyte
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Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way. -- David Whyte
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Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown. -- David Whyte
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You'll always love the person, if you're sensible. But you get a lot of people, especially in divorces and separations, doing a lot of damage to themselves, because they can't figure out that they actually still love this person, but not in their original way. -- David Whyte
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But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside -- David Whyte
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The antidote to exhaustion isn't rest.
It's wholeheartedness. -- David Whyte
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We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering. -- David Whyte
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And how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love -- David Whyte
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To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstandin g of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear. -- David Whyte
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Poetry: Language against which we have no defences. -- David Whyte
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Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story; we do not know where we are in the story. We do not know who, ultimately, is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. -- David Whyte
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The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears -- David Whyte
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Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world. -- David Whyte
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Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves. -- David Whyte
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Walking the roads is enough today, I'll follow the dark line of receding sun -- David Whyte
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All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone - and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment. -- David Whyte
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In Germany, they have great difficulty with anything that smacks of cultism or messianic leadership. You can't talk about leadership in its charismatic forms. -- David Whyte
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I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement. -- David Whyte
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The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it. -- David Whyte
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The true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love of a child, a partner, a work, or a road we have to take against the odds. -- David Whyte
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I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love. -- David Whyte
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It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. -- David Whyte
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The tragedy with velocity as the answer to complexity is that, after awhile, you cannot see or comprehend anything that is not traveling at the same speed you are. And you actually start to feel disturbed by people who have a sense of restfulness to their existence. -- David Whyte
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Let the apple ripen
on the branch
beyond your need
to take it down. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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A true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. -- David Whyte
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A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. -- David Whyte
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Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree. -- David Whyte
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Sincere regret may be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. -- David Whyte
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Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future. -- David Whyte
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A sure sign of a soul-based workplace is excitement, enthusiasm, real passion; not manufactured passion, but real involvement. And there's very little fear. -- David Whyte
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The moment you've uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you're already turning towards home. -- David Whyte
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In the poetic tradition, the heart's affections are indeed holy, and if organizations are asking for people's hearts and minds, they are asking in a way for their holy and hidden affections at the same time. -- David Whyte
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Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. -- David Whyte
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Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth. -- David Whyte
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To seek out beauty in our work is to make a pilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done, but who we have become while accomplishing the task. -- David Whyte
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Heartbreak is how we mature ... There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak. -- David Whyte
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Genius is becoming something you were all along. -- David Whyte
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Things have a way of being richer in the end, a product better made, for the circuitous route we take to include all the elements that are necessary for a job well done. -- David Whyte
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Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance. -- David Whyte
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To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. -- David Whyte
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Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. Pay attention to everything in the world as if it's alive. Realize everything has its own discrete existence outside your story. By doing this, you open to gifts and lessons that the world has to give you. -- David Whyte
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Enough.
These few words are enough
If not these few words, this breath
If not this breath, this sitting here
This opening to the life we have refused again and again
Until now
Until now. -- David Whyte
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What if the world is holding its breath -
waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill? -- David Whyte
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I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science. -- David Whyte
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Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising. -- David Whyte
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There is no house like the house of belonging. -- David Whyte
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If you've given away a sense of your own destiny, you need enormous amounts of hierarchy and protection within the structure to make up for what you've given away. -- David Whyte
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Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you. -- David Whyte
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I don't have an all-embracing vision which people have to buy. I'm simply trying to work with the struggles we all deal with every day while we're trying to live out our personal destinies and make a living at the same time. -- David Whyte
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Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity. -- David Whyte
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What we love in other human beings is the hoped-for satisfaction of our desire, we do not love them for their desire. If what we loved in them was their desire, then we should love them as our self. When -- David Whyte
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There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation. -- David Whyte
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We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. -- David Whyte
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We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again -- David Whyte
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The outlaw is the radical, the one close to the roots of existence. The one who refuses to forget their humanity and, in remembering, helps everyone else remember, too. -- David Whyte
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Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity. -- David Whyte
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The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have. -- David Whyte
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By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar. -- David Whyte
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The art form has to do with the mystery and the hidden invitation that's in the room. And that's when the magic happens, that's when the deep silence emerges to the surprise of all the attentively listening ears. In a way, you're following that silence. You go where the silence is deepest. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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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? -- David Whyte
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We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember again as our own. -- David Whyte
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There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being. -- David Whyte
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Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties. -- David Whyte
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Poetry is language against which you have no defenses. -- David Whyte
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To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. -- David Whyte
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Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human. -- David Whyte
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I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. -- David Whyte
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To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance. -- David Whyte
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Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. -- David Whyte
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Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don't mistake other people's questions for your own. -- David Whyte
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Start close in,
don't take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don't want to take. -- David Whyte
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Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown. -- David Whyte
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Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding. -- David Whyte
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The ultimate lesson is that there is no immunity, no matter our age or the size of our retirement account, from going through constant cycles of integration and disintegration in which we are humbled and hopefully set to rights with the world again. -- David Whyte
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One of the great difficulties as you rise up through an organisation is that your prior competencies are exploded and broken apart by the territory you've been promoted into: the field of human identity. -- David Whyte
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Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation. -- David Whyte
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Work and life are not separate things and therefore cannot be balanced against each other except to create further trouble. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities. -- David Whyte
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Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. -- David Whyte
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It is difficult to be creative and enthusiastic about anything for which we do not feel affection. -- David Whyte
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Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made. -- David Whyte
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Wanting soul life without the dark, warming intelligence of personal doubt is like expecting an egg without the brooding heat of the mother hen. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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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. -- David Whyte
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Absent the edge, we drown in numbness. -- David Whyte
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Poetry is a break for freedom. -- David Whyte
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The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering. -- David Whyte
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Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born. -- David Whyte
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Shedding the carapace we have been building so assiduously on the surface, we must by definition give up exactly what we thought was necessary to protect us from further harm. -- David Whyte
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What you plan is too small for you to live. -- David Whyte
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What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence. -- David Whyte
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But then we always knew heaven would be a desperate place. Everything you desired coming in one fearful moment to greet you. -- David Whyte
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What I have not seen
or failed to see
I leave as a gift. -- David Whyte
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Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat. -- David Whyte