David Whyte is an Anglo-Irish poet. He has said that all of his poetry and philosophy is based on “the conversational nature of reality”.His book The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America (1994) topped the best-seller charts in the United States. These David Whyte quotes will motivate you.
Best David Whyte Quotes
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
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“What if the world is holding its breath -waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
- “The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not an 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.” ~ David Whyte, David Whyte quotes on friendship
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“We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
- “Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for a while. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
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“The antidote to exhaustion isn’t rest. It’s wholeheartedness.” ~ David Whyte
- “Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.” ~ David Whyte
- “Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
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“I want to know if you knowhow to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.” ~ David Whyte
- “As human beings we have this immediate gateway – you’ve just to articulate exactly the way that you’re exiled, exactly the way that you don’t belong, exactly the way that you can’t love, exactly the way that you can’t move … and you’re on your way again. You’re on your way home. If you can just say exactly the way that you’re imprisoned – the door swings open.” ~ David Whyte
- “Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte, David Whyte quotes on work
- “Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.” ~ David Whyte
- “Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.” ~ David Whyte
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“The courageous conversation is the one you don’t want to have.” ~ David Whyte
- “Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for a while. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way. We articulate the truth of a situation by carrying the whole experience in the voice and allowing the process to blossom of its own accord. Out of the cross-grain of experience appears a voice that not only sums up the process we have gone through, but allows the soul to recognize in its timbre, the color, texture, and complicated entanglements of being alive.” ~ David Whyte
- “Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.” ~ David Whyte
- “To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.” ~ David Whyte
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“Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
- “Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.” ~ David Whyte
- “What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.” ~ David Whyte
- “Desire demands only a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field which surrounds us and from which we can recharge ourselves every moment as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.” ~ David Whyte
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“The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else’s life thinking it was your own.” ~ David Whyte
- “Heartbreak is our indication of sincerity: in a love relationship, in a work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete’s quick but abstract ability to let go… But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.” ~ David Whyte, David Whyte quotes on love
- “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?” ~ David Whyte
- “I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.” ~ David Whyte
- “The moment you’ve uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you’re already turning towards home.” ~ David Whyte
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“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.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
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“Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.” ~ David Whyte
- “See, even if you’re stuck in life, if you can describe just exactly the way you’re stuck, then you will immediately recognize that you can’t go on that way anymore. So, just saying precisely, writing precisely how you’re stuck, or how you’re alienated, opens up a door of freedom for you.” ~ David Whyte
- “Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul’s break for freedom.” ~ David Whyte
- “Whether we stay or whether we go – to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.” ~ David Whyte
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“There is no house like the house of belonging.” ~ David Whyte
- “To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
- “Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.” ~ David Whyte, David Whyte quotes on vulnerability
- “What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside, can seem more like constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others, because they reside in far too private a chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily trouble, but often the opposite. To have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish.” ~ David Whyte
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“The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears” ~ David Whyte
- “The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.” ~ David Whyte
- “A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.” ~ David Whyte
- “We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again” ~ David Whyte
- “When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love.” ~ David Whyte
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“Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
- “To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.” ~ David Whyte
- “Genius is becoming something you were all along.” ~ David Whyte
- “The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.” ~ David Whyte
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“What you plan is too small for you to live.” ~ David Whyte
- “Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.” ~ David Whyte
- “You’ll always love the person if you’re sensible. But you get a lot of people, especially in divorces and separations, doing a lot of damage to themselves, because they can’t figure out that they actually still love this person, but not in their original way.” ~ David Whyte
- “I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.” ~ David Whyte
- “Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.” ~ David Whyte
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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.” ~ David Whyte
- “The severest test of work today is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
- “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 heartbroken, so why not get on with it and stop wanting these extra-special circumstances which stop me from doing something courageous?'” ~ David Whyte
- “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.” ~ David Whyte
