Quotes from David Whyte

Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once.

We might at first label the body's simple need to focus inward depression. But as we practice going inward, we come to realize that much of it is not depression in the least; it is a cry for something else, often the physical body's simple need for rest, for contemplation, and for a kind of forgotten courage, one difficult to hear, demanding not a raise, but another life.

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.

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.

What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make enough plans

work and life are not separate things and therefore cannot be balanced against each other except to create further trouble.

What we love in other human beings is the hoped-for satisfaction of our desire, we do not love them for their desire. If what we loved in them was their desire, then we should love them as our self." When

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.

So may we, in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine, and look for the true shape of our own self, by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.

Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, this sitting here. This opening to life we have refused again and again until now. Until now.

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

Any life, & any life's work, is a hidden journey, a secret code, deciphered in fits & starts. The details only given truth by the whole, & the whole dependent on the details." "...having the powerful characteristics of captaincy or leadership of any form is almost always an outward sign of a person inhabiting their physical body & the deeper elements of their own nature.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Walking the roads is enough today, I'll follow the dark line of receding sun

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

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.

We find that, all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had experienced the actual heartbreak of the journey.

Work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself. It is a place full of powerful undercurrents, a place to find our selves, but also, a place to drown, losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation.

Poetry: Language against which we have no defences.