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We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.

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
Preventing
Species
Capable
Earth
Flowering

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.
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What if the world is holding its breath - waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?
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Poetry is a break for freedom.
David Whyte
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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.
David Whyte
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Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.
David Whyte
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Heartbreak is how we mature... There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.
David Whyte
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Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
David Whyte
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Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.
David Whyte
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Genius is becoming something you were all along.
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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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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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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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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.
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.
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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.
David Whyte
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The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears
David Whyte