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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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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
Live
Thinking
Life
Tragedy
Greatest
Else
Someone
More quotes by David Whyte
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
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
David Whyte
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
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
To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
David Whyte
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
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.
David Whyte
Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
David Whyte
Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown.
David Whyte
We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.
David Whyte
What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.
David Whyte
Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.
David Whyte
The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.
David Whyte
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
We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember again as our own.
David Whyte
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
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
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
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
Genius is becoming something you were all along.
David Whyte
