David Whyte Quotations | Page 2

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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?'

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

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.

Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.

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

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.

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.

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

The antidote to exhaustion isn't rest. It's wholeheartedness.

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.

We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember again as our own.

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

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.

Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind of acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

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.

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.

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.

Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.

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.

We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The ultimate lesson is that there is no immunity, no matter our age or the size of our retirement account, from going through constant cycles of integration and disintegration in which we are humbled and hopefully set to rights with the world again.

The greatest luxury of having money should be not having to worry about it.

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.