Quotes from David Whyte

The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.

Winning does not tempt that man, this is how he grows, by being defeated decisively, by greater and greater beings.

HORSES MOVING ON THE SNOW In winter through the damp grass around the house there are horses moving on the snow in the half-light they move quickly following the fence until the mist takes them completely and evening is the hollow sound of hooves in the south field.

Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. You are not leaving. Even as the light fades quickly now, you are arriving.

In the end comes also our beginning, the ancient sense of a door opening to some final unknown, some invisible voice attempting to help us come to terms with our own disappearance, the hand extended to help us over a horizon equally as mysterious as the one we crossed at our birth.

those who can most truly be accounted brave are those who best know the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then go out, undeterred, to meet what is to come. —PERICLES

Our destiny is fated not only by great powers beyond our beckoning horizon but by the very way we shape and hold the everyday conversations of a familiar life.

To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.

as Rilke said, 'Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.

THE BELL AND THE BLACKBIRD (excerpt) The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of a field. Asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper to one that waits. Either way takes courage, either way wants you to be nothing but that self that is no self at all, wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know how to give every last thing away.

One of the prices we pay in the segregation of education by age is the self-referential reality that each class year and generation makes for itself. There is nothing more conservative and repressive in this world than the peer pressure of teenagers determined to enforce the unwritten codes of their world.

If forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.

There is a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way. I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world. — David Whyte, from "The Truelove," The Sea In You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love (Many Rivers Press, 2016)

We're moving toward the kind of work world which has less security. But we hope it has more creativity and possibility of real engagement.

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

Things have a way of being richer in the end, a product better made, for the circuitous route we take to include all the elements that are necessary for a job well done.

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.

Sometimes you have to make a complete disaster of your life in such an epic way that it will be absolutely clear to you what you've been doing.

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.

The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.

One of the great difficulties as you rise up through an organisation is that your prior competencies are exploded and broken apart by the territory you've been promoted into: the field of human identity.

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.