David Whyte Quotes
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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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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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When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.
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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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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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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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Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.
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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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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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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.
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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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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 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.
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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.
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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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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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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 gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
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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 good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.
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Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.