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

More quotes by David Whyte

Image
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
Image
Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.
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
Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.
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
Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
David Whyte
Image
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
Image
To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence.
David Whyte
Image
Genius is becoming something you were all along.
David Whyte
Image
I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.
David Whyte
Image
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
Image
The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.
David Whyte
Image
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
Image
We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.
David Whyte
Image
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
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
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
Image
A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.
David Whyte
Image
What if the world is holding its breath - waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?
David Whyte
Image
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