Quote

and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love

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
Faith
Subtly
Moment
Intimately
Moments
Preparing
Come
Waking
Love
Calling
Except
Grandly
Face
Biblically
Faces
Abrupt

More quotes by David Whyte

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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
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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.
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The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears
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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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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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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.
David Whyte
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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.
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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.
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There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
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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
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The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.
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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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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.
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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.
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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
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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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There is no house like the house of belonging.
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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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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
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Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.
David Whyte