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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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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
Tests
Identity
Imagination
Severest
Today
Identities
Work
Imaginations
Strategies
Test
Strategy

More quotes by David Whyte

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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.
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
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Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
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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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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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.
David Whyte
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Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown.
David Whyte
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Poetry is a break for freedom.
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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I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.
David Whyte
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The tragedy with velocity as the answer to complexity is that, after awhile, you cannot see or comprehend anything that is not traveling at the same speed you are. And you actually start to feel disturbed by people who have a sense of restfulness to their existence.
David Whyte
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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.
David Whyte
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Genius is becoming something you were all along.
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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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 marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
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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Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.
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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Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
David Whyte