David Whyte Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear.

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

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

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.

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.

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind of acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.

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

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.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.

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.

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

It's my contention that there is no sincere path a human being can take without breaking his or her heart...so it can be a lovely, merciful thing to think, 'Actually, there is no path I can take without having my heart broken, so why not get on with it and stop wanting these extra-special circumstances which stop me from doing something courageous?'

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.

I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.

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.

We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves.

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?

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.

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.

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

Desire demands only a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field which surrounds us and from which we can recharge ourselves every moment, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.

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

I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.

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

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.

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

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

As human beings we have this immediate gateway - you’ve just to articulate exactly the way that you’re exiled, exactly the way that you don’t belong, exactly the way that you can’t love, exactly the way that you can’t move ... and you’re on your way again. You’re on your way home. If you can just say exactly the way that you’re imprisoned - the door swings open.

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

Heartbreak is our indication of sincerity: in a love relationship, in a work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go... But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way...

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.

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

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.

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.

Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside, can seem more like constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others, because they reside in far too private a chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily trouble, but often the opposite. To have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish.

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

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

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

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

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love.

There is no house like the house of belonging.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Genius is becoming something you were all along.

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.

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.