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There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

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
Poetry
Comes
Whole
Empiricism
Practicality
Lyrical
Imaginative
Fierce
Aspect

More quotes by David Whyte

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To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
David Whyte
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But what would that be like feeling the tide rise out of the numbness inside
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Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
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Genius is becoming something you were all along.
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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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Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.
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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.
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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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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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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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I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.
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.
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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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The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.
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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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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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I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.
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
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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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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