David Whyte Quotes
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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 not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear.
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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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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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Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.
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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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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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It is difficult to be creative and enthusiastic about anything for which we do not feel affection.
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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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A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.
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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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There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
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The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.
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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.
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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.
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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 lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.
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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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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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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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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 speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief.