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Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.

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
Numbness
Drown
Absent
Edge
Edges

More quotes by David Whyte

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To give generously but appropriately and then, most difficult of all, and as the full apotheosis of the art, with feeling, in the moment and spontaneously, has always been recognized as one of the greatest of human qualities.
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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.
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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.
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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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The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears
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I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.
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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.
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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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I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.
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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.
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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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But what would that be like feeling the tide rise out of the numbness inside
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I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.
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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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Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.
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The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.
David Whyte
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We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again
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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.
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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.
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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.
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