Quote

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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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
Condition
Mill
Personality
Mills
Failure
Strangely
Conditions
Bankruptcy
May
Secretly
Soul
Joyful
Years
Engineering
Disaster
Grist

More quotes by 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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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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The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.
David Whyte
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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.
David Whyte
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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
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To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
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
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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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Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
David Whyte
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What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.
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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Genius is becoming something you were all along.
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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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.
David Whyte
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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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Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief turning downward through it s black water to the place we cannot breathe will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else.
David Whyte
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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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I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.
David Whyte
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The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears
David Whyte
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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.
David Whyte