David Whyte Quotes - Page 2

Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for a while. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way. We articulate the truth of a situation by carrying the whole experience in the voice and allowing the process to blossom of its own accord. Out of the cross-grain of experience appears a voice that not only sums up the process we have gone through, but allows the soul to recognize in its timbre, the color, texture, and complicated entanglements of being alive.

Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.

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.

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.

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.

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

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

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

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

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.

There is no house like the house of belonging.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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