Quotes from David Whyte

In building a work life, people who follow rules, written or unwritten, too closely and in an unimaginative way are often suffocated by those same rules and die by them, quite often unnoticed and very often unmourned.

Good work, done well for the right reasons...

We banish the misaligned when we align with what we are called to; we become visible and real when we give our gift and stop waiting for the gift to be given to us.

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.

By definition, soul evades the cage of definition. It is the indefinable essence of a person's spirit and being. It can never be touched and yet the merest hint of its absence causes immediate distress.

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

We are shaped by our shaping of the world.

Cavanaugh says to be constantly describing yourself and to think you know who you are and to be constantly explaining to others is a gospel of despair. To be yourself and to put yourself in conversation with others and to overhear yourself saying things you didn't know you knew, this is more like the truth, this is more like the poetic imagination … and the weakness of the prose, according to Cavanaugh, is the person who tries to get to a given goal in a staight line.

In the contemplative Christian tradition, to be humiliated is to be returned to the ground of your being.

And when you are humiliated all your fancy ideas about yourself and who you are and what you can accomplish and how are shriveled away suddenly in the encounter with the ground.

The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.

We have the same strange idea in work as we do in love: that we will engender love, loyalty, and admiration in others by exhibiting a great sense of power and competency. We are surprised to find that we garner fear and respect but forgo the other, more intimate magic. Real, undying loyalty in work can never be legislated or coerced; it is based on a courageous vulnerability that invites others by our example to a frontier conversation whose outcome is yet in doubt.

You have a moment in the day, as Blake said, that Satan (the strategic mind, worried about being 'productive') cannot find.

The room is still quite cold when the list of achievements is read but the atmosphere quickens when you hear what they loved, what they held in their affections…you realize what you learn you have lost [in someone dying] is you've lose what they loved and everything else is like chafe blown away.

The summation of a person's life is the sum of what they held in their affections. This natural gravity field, this natural gravity well of belonging, which finds a particular coloration according to the way we're made, is the secret keep to compassion.

A]nger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague.

all friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness.

The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level.

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks, how the discarded is woven into shelter, learn the way things hidden and unspoken slowly proclaim their voice in the world. Find that far inward symmetry to all outward appearances, apprentice yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back all you sent away, be a new annunciation, make yourself a door through which to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.

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.

The antidote to exhaustion is not rest; it's wholeheartedness.

Only those who put more energy into self-pity than into paying attention are truly marooned.

Recall the way you are all possibilities you can see and how you live best as an appreciator of horizons whether you reach them or not.

You must learn one thing: the world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. 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