David Whyte Quotes
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It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear.
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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.
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It is difficult to be creative and enthusiastic about anything for which we do not feel affection.
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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.
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The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.
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Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
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Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
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A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.
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When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.
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Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.
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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.
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Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.
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If you've given away a sense of your own destiny, you need enormous amounts of hierarchy and protection within the structure to make up for what you've given away.
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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.
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There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation.