David Whyte Quotes - Page 3

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.

Genius is becoming something you were all along.

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.

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.

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.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

What you plan is too small for you to live.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.