David Whyte famous quotes

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

#Heaven #Lines #One Line

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

#Triumph #World #Persuasion

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

#Inspirational #Wholeheartedness #Antidote

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.
-- David Whyte

#Journey #Essence #Sight

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

#Humans

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.
-- David Whyte

#Community #Heartfelt #Courageous

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

#Community #Heartfelt #Participation

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?'
-- David Whyte

#Heart #Thinking #Broken

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

#Doe #Alive

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

#Latin #Humility #Pride

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

#Home #Moments #Exile

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

#Inspirational #Joy #Waiting

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

#Ease #Weight #Conversation

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

#Waiting #What If #World

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

#Life #Art #Memories

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

#Intimacy #Abandoned #Deny

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

#Love #Want #Willing

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

#Journey #Soul #World

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

#Voice #Different #Way

There is no house like the house of belonging.
-- David Whyte

#House #Belonging

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

#Life #Sailing #Way

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

#Inspirational #Giving Up #Other Worlds

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

#Sleep #Vitality #Enough

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

#Sitting #Few Words #Enough

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

#Struggle #Silence #Soul

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.
-- David Whyte

#Sweet #Darkness #Doe

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.
-- David Whyte

#Tired #Eye #Dark

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

#Earth #Flowering #Species

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

#Real #Passion #Soul

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

#Identity #Doe #Asking

Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
-- David Whyte

#Numbness #Absent

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

#Roots #Humanity #Helping

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

#Way #Courageous #Made

To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self...the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation...
-- David Whyte

#Self #Joy #Doorways

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

#Faith #Calling #Faces

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

#Reality #Identity #Weakness

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.
-- David Whyte

#Bird #Waiting #Cooking

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

#Fall #Want #Heat

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.
-- David Whyte

#Ocean #Breathing #Feet

The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears
-- David Whyte

#Vitality

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

#Reality #Might #Stories

What you plan is too small for you to live.
-- David Whyte

#Inspirational #Plans

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

#Other Worlds #Inheritance #Remember

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

#Inspirational #Angel #Perfection

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

#Numbness #Feelings #Tides

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

#Giving #Attention #Stories

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

#Want #Firsts #Steps

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

#Lying #Tasks #Done

Genius is becoming something you were all along.
-- David Whyte

#Genius #Becoming

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

#Imagination #Identity #Today

Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.
-- David Whyte

#Honesty #Grief #Loss

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...
-- David Whyte

#Letting Go #Spiritual #Athlete

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

#Interesting #Quality #Definitions

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

#Art #Skills #World

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

#Mistake #Drama

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

#Believe #I Believe #Desperate

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

#Giving Up #Insecurity #Definitions

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.
-- David Whyte

#Inspirational #Real #Thinking

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

#Mind #Doe #Care

Being young and trying to catch a glimpse of the depths, of the true self, of the soul, or whatever human beings have called it over the centuries, we often find ourselves surrounded by bossy, hectoring voices trying to short-circuit our personal experience by super-imposing their own disappointments. Much of this bossiness masquerades as an education.
-- David Whyte

#Inspirational #Disappointment #Self

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

#World #Way #Precision

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

#Real #Want #Conversation

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

#Fierce #Lyrical #Aspect

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
-- David Whyte

#Discipline #Alertness #Familiarity

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

#Average #Narrative #Truthful

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

#Self #World #Shapes

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

#Gratitude #Attention #Arise

Poetry is a break for freedom.
-- David Whyte

#Break #Poetry Is

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

#Loss #Thinking #Might

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

#Looks #Elbows #Manipulation

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

#Religious #Silence #Artistic

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

#Children #Heart #Parent

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

#Loss #Looks #Gains

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

#Soul #World #Workplace

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

#Body

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.
-- David Whyte

#Moving #Home #Swings