David Whyte Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don't mistake other people's questions for your own. — David Whyte

THE OPENING OF EYES After R. S. Thomas That day I saw beneath dark clouds, the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out, I knew then, as I had before, life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing, speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground. — David Whyte

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

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

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

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

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

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without. Vulnerability is not a choice. Vulnerability is the underlying, ever-present, and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature. The attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not, and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability, we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential title and conversational foundations of our identity. — David Whyte

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

But then we always knew heaven would be a desperate place. Everything you desired coming in one fearful moment to greet you. — David Whyte

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

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

Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity. — David Whyte

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

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

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

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

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

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. — David Whyte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — David Whyte

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

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

The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it. — David Whyte

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

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

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

Let the apple ripen
on the branch
beyond your need
to take it down. — David Whyte

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

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

Poetry: Language against which we have no defences. — David Whyte

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

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

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

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

Forgiveness is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw centre, to reimagine our relation to it. — David Whyte

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

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

The workplace needs the poet's gift. But the poet also needs to be educated about the workplace. You're not just coming in to do your art, you're actually making yourself vulnerable. You yourself are not God's gift to truth. You have to hazard yourself in their world, especially because you're inviting people to do the same. It's all about become visible, becoming incarnate, becoming here and now and yet with our eyes on a future horizon; holding the conversation you were meant to hold. — David Whyte

Lost'

Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you. — David Whyte

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

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

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

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

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. The dark will be your womb tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up on all other worlds except the one to which you belong. 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

What I have not seen
or failed to see
I leave as a gift. — David Whyte

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding. — David Whyte

Poetry is language against which you have no defenses. — David Whyte

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

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

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

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

I love the best of all the traditions. My discipline is the take-no-prisoners language of good poetry, but a language that actually frees us from prejudice, no matter what religion or political persuasion they are. I try to create a river-like discourse. The river is not political, it's not on your side or against you. It's an invitation into the onward flow. — David Whyte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ambition left to itself, like a Rupert Murdoch, always becomes tedious, its only object the creation of larger and larger empires of control; but 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. We find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had undertaken the journey. — David Whyte

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

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

And after you were up, when the light had come and the moon had gone, you found the path again waiting through the open window, the faces at the table gazing with you, as you sat with your coffee, silently letting the sense of rest seat home, the body ready to walk, in rhythm and in rhyme, with the given, unspoken source. — David Whyte

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

Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree. — David Whyte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming at all. — David Whyte

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live. — David Whyte

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

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