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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.

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
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Realms
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More quotes by David Whyte

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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.
David Whyte
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The art form has to do with the mystery and the hidden invitation that's in the room. And that's when the magic happens, that's when the deep silence emerges to the surprise of all the attentively listening ears. In a way, you're following that silence. You go where the silence is deepest.
David Whyte
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Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
David Whyte
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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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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.
David Whyte
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What if the world is holding its breath - waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?
David Whyte
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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.
David Whyte
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Genius is becoming something you were all along.
David Whyte
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Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world. This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's.
David Whyte
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I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.
David Whyte
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The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears
David Whyte
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To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous to allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self...the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation.
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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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.
David Whyte
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What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.
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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The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.
David Whyte
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We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember again as our own.
David Whyte
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Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown.
David Whyte
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Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
David Whyte