David Whyte
It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Poetry
Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Relationship
Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.Collection: Change
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.Collection: Poetry
Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Beauty
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Community
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.Collection: Voice
Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.Collection: Gratitude
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.Collection: Real
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Life
We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.Collection: Earth
Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Triumph
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.Collection: Journey
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?'Collection: Heart
I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Latin
Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.Collection: Life
To give generously but appropriately and then, most difficult of all, and as the full apotheosis of the art, with feeling, in the moment and spontaneously, has always been recognized as one of the greatest of human qualities.Collection: Art
It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.Collection: Loss
Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Sound
The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality.Collection: Reality
Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.Collection: Numbness
Poetry is a break for freedom.Collection: Break
It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others.Collection: Despair
Shedding the carapace we have been building so assiduously on the surface, we must by definition give up exactly what we thought was necessary to protect us from further harm.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Soul
The workplace needs the poet's gift. But the poet also needs to be educated about the workplace. You're not just coming in to do your art, you're actually making yourself vulnerable. You yourself are not God's gift to truth. You have to hazard yourself in their world, especially because you're inviting people to do the same. It's all about become visible, becoming incarnate, becoming here and now and yet with our eyes on a future horizon; holding the conversation you were meant to hold.Collection: Art
When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting.Collection: Struggle