David Whyte Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.

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.

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

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

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

There is no house like the house of belonging.

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

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

Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Genius is becoming something you were all along.

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

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.