Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Sometimes
Takes
Alive
Small
Anyone
Aloneness
Suffering
Confinement
Learn
Darkness
Doe
Sweet
Anything
Bring

More quotes by David Whyte

Image
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
Image
The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.
David Whyte
Image
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
Image
I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.
David Whyte
Image
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
Image
Poetry is a break for freedom.
David Whyte
Image
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
Image
To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
David Whyte
Image
Genius is becoming something you were all along.
David Whyte
Image
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
David Whyte
Image
We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.
David Whyte
Image
I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.
David Whyte
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.
David Whyte
Image
A good poem has its own life. It's like bringing a child into the world. You, the poet, birthed the child, but the child will surprise you continually. I think a work of art has its own aliveness, its own future.
David Whyte
Image
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
Image
Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
David Whyte
Image
The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.
David Whyte
Image
To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
David Whyte