Top 140 David Whyte Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.”

— David Whyte

102. “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.”

— David Whyte

103. “The great measure of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through.”

— David Whyte

104. “I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.”

— David Whyte

105. “What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.”

— David Whyte

106. “Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.”

— David Whyte

107. “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.”

— David Whyte

108. “Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavour; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.”

— David Whyte

109. “Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don’t mistake other people’s questions for your own.”

— David Whyte

110. “We have patience for everything but what is most important to us. We look at the life of our own most central imaginings and see it beckon. For the most part, we have not the courage to follow it, but we do not have the courage to leave it. We turn our face for a moment and tell ourselves we will be sure to get back to it. When we look again, ten years have passed and we wonder what in God’s name happened to us.”

— David Whyte

111. “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.”

— David Whyte

112. “Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.”

— David Whyte

113. “Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.”

— David Whyte

114. “The true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love of a child, a partner, a work, or a road we have to take against the odds.”

— David Whyte

115. “Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.”

— David Whyte

116. “To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.”

— David Whyte

117. “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.”

— David Whyte

118. “The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.”

— David Whyte

119. “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

120. “There’s a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.”

— David Whyte

121. “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.”

— David Whyte

122. “To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape our identities and our bodies and our relation to others.”

— David Whyte

123. “But then we always knew heaven would be a desperate place. Everything you desired coming in one fearful moment to greet you.”

— David Whyte

124. “We do not even have time to find out if our momentum is taking us over the nearest cliff.”

— David Whyte

125. “What we are actually about to become or are afraid of becoming always trumps and rules over what we think we are already.”

— David Whyte

126. “In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming at all.”

— David Whyte

127. “To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy: a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.”

— David Whyte

128. “Help is strangely, something we want to do without, as if the very idea disturbs and blurs the boundaries of our individual endeavors, as if we cannot face how much we need in order to go on.”

— David Whyte

129. “Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world, a presence that seems to demand a moving internal symmetry in the one breathing and listening equal to its own breathing, listening elemental powers.”

— David Whyte

130. “There is no possibility of pursuing a work without coming to terms with all the ways it is impossible to do it. Feeling far away from what we want tells us one of two things about our work: that we are at the beginning or that we have.”

— David Whyte

131. “Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.”

— David Whyte

132. “The pursuit of the self is the pursuit of that part of us not defined by our worries and anxieties. But this pursuit begins only by admitting that human anxiety is endless and to be expected. These waves of existential anxiety may knock down the surface self, but there is another, deeper self with a larger perspective that was never knocked down at all. The pursuit of the self is the pursuit of this non-self, one large enough to hold the necessary losses of a human life.”

— David Whyte

133. “Life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something other than you own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn’t based on triumphing over it or complaining about it.”

— David Whyte

134. “The marriage of work has everything to do with the romance of the everyday.”

— David Whyte

135. “Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something or someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready to let go of the way we are holding things, and preparation perhaps for the last letting go of all.”

— David Whyte

136. “To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.”

— David Whyte

137. “We each have a particular way of shaping ourselves in the world. To take on someone else’s conversational style and to keep repeating other people’s questions as if they were our own is to exhaust ourselves. It doesn’t matter if it is the thoughts of Socrates or Susan Sontag. Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.”

— David Whyte

138. “Work is freighted with difficulty and possibility of visible failure, failure to provide, to succeed, to make a difference, to be seen and to be seen to be seen. Work, therefore is robust vulnerability, and a good part of the time, a journey leading us through very unbeautiful private and public humiliations.”

— David Whyte

139. “What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside can seem more like a constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others because they reside in a far too private chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily to travel off, 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

140. “The ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it, as it does by having it answered. You just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.”

— David Whyte