David Whyte
Shyness means you are in the hallway of a greater presence. You just don't know how to take the conversation another step. It's a lovely indication.Collection: Mean
If I don't have time for the writing, it's because I'm not making that time. It's really just a question of whether you want to or not, whether you feel you deserve to write or not.Collection: Writing
Being young and trying to catch a glimpse of the depths, of the true self, of the soul, or whatever human beings have called it over the centuries, we often find ourselves surrounded by bossy, hectoring voices trying to short-circuit our personal experience by super-imposing their own disappointments. Much of this bossiness masquerades as an education.Collection: Inspirational
The art form has to do with the mystery and the hidden invitation that's in the room. And that's when the magic happens, that's when the deep silence emerges to the surprise of all the attentively listening ears. In a way, you're following that silence. You go where the silence is deepest.Collection: Art
I love the best of all the traditions. My discipline is the take-no-prisoners language of good poetry, but a language that actually frees us from prejudice, no matter what religion or political persuasion they are. I try to create a river-like discourse. The river is not political, it's not on your side or against you. It's an invitation into the onward flow.Collection: Your Side
The outlaw is the radical, the one close to the roots of existence. The one who refuses to forget their humanity and, in remembering, helps everyone else remember, too.Collection: Roots
Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief turning downward through it s black water to the place we cannot breathe will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else.Collection: Grief
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.Collection: Alertness Is
and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to loveCollection: Faith
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.Collection: Mainstream Society
The tragedy with velocity as the answer to complexity is that, after awhile, you cannot see or comprehend anything that is not traveling at the same speed you are. And you actually start to feel disturbed by people who have a sense of restfulness to their existence.Collection: People
In England especially, poetry's woven into the background fabric of society. And in Ireland, it's in the foreground. The place of the poet in Irish society is enormous. If you say you're a poet in Ireland, you'd better know what you're doing, because the standard and the expectations are incredibly high.Collection: Expectations
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.Collection: Average
A good poem has its own life. It's like bringing a child into the world. You, the poet, birthed the child, but the child will surprise you continually. I think a work of art has its own aliveness, its own future.Collection: Art
The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.Collection: Want
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.Collection: Community
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?Collection: Years
The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.Collection: Thinking
I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.Collection: Love
Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.Collection: Understanding
Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.Collection: Heaven
What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.Collection: Mind
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Adversity
Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.Collection: Honesty
The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fearsCollection: Vitality
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.Collection: Letting Go
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.Collection: Ease
To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.Collection: Humans
See, even if you're stuck in life, if you can describe just exactly the way you're stuck, then you will immediately recognise 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.Collection: Writing
What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.Collection: Sleep
There is no house like the house of belonging.Collection: House
The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.Collection: Body
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.Collection: Ocean
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.Collection: Work
To seek out beauty in our work is to make a pilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done, but who we have become while accomplishing the task.Collection: Lying
The moment you’ve uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you’re already turning towards home.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Eye
Genius is becoming something you were all along.Collection: Genius
What you plan is too small for you to live.Collection: Inspirational
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 misunderstandin g of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Bird
The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.Collection: Imagination
Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Opposites
The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.Collection: Loss
The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.Collection: Identity