Quote

There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.

David Whyte

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David Whyte
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: September 21
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Poet
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Marrickville
New South Wales
Australia
Meaning
Root
Pride
Latin
Effects
Soil
Word
Lovely
Effect
Humus
Humility
Humiliated
Roots
Returning
Ground
Humiliation

More quotes by David Whyte

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We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves.
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Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief turning downward through it s black water to the place we cannot breathe will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else.
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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.
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In England especially, poetry's woven into the background fabric of society. And in Ireland, it's in the foreground. The place of the poet in Irish society is enormous. If you say you're a poet in Ireland, you'd better know what you're doing, because the standard and the expectations are incredibly high.
David Whyte
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Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
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For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.
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To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstandin g of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.
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The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.
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What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.
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The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
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Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
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To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
David Whyte
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There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
David Whyte
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The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.
David Whyte
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Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.
David Whyte
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Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.
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When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting.
David Whyte
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If I don't have time for the writing, it's because I'm not making that time. It's really just a question of whether you want to or not, whether you feel you deserve to write or not.
David Whyte
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A sure sign of a soul-based workplace is excitement, enthusiasm, real passion not manufactured passion, but real involvement. And there's very little fear.
David Whyte