Quotes from David Whyte

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.

Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation.

There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.

If you've given away a sense of your own destiny, you need enormous amounts of hierarchy and protection within the structure to make up for what you've given away.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.

We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

A soul-based workplace asks things of me that I didn't even know I had. It's constantly telling me that I belong to something large in the world.

Sincere regret may be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own.

I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.

Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.

There are many tough conversations, but one of the most difficult is between a parent and an adolescent daughter, partly because as a parent we are almost always attempting to relate to someone who is no longer there.

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

The greatest luxury of having money should be not having to worry about it.

I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement.

The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.

In the poetic tradition, the heart's affections are indeed holy, and if organizations are asking for people's hearts and minds, they are asking in a way for their holy and hidden affections at the same time.

All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone - and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.

The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality.

Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.

The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.

In Germany, they have great difficulty with anything that smacks of cultism or messianic leadership. You can't talk about leadership in its charismatic forms.