David Whyte Quotes

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

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

We banish the misaligned when we align with what we are called to; we become visible and real when we give our gift and stop waiting for the gift to be given to us.

The interesting dynamic about human happiness in the marriage to work is that we can glide down the road in the metaphorical Jaguar XK 150, having a completely miserable, blazing argument with our partner while the wind is blowing unheeded through our hair. I can also find myself in the aptly name Ford Focus, laughing my way into a marvelous excursion. But neither Ford Focus nor Jaguar can guarantee us a place in the kingdom of happiness. It is the one in the driver's set, setting the destination and the attitude for the journey of work and vocation, who seems to make up our real possibilities for satisfaction over time.

The difficult truth is that our kingdom does not have to be very big at all in order for us to do good work: what is difficult is simply starting the work and carrying on with it day after day. My work space can be a small corner of a table on a train or if we are really, really focused, a knee on which to balance a writing pad.

Feeling far away from what we want tells us one of two things about our work: that we are at the beginning or that we have forgotten where we were going.

In building a work life, people who follow rules, written or unwritten, too closely and in an unimaginative way are often suffocated by those same rules and die by them, quite often unnoticed and very often unmourned.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make enough plans

Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.

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.

the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another

Our destiny is fated not only by great powers beyond our beckoning horizon but by the very way we shape and hold the everyday conversations of a familiar life.

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.

HORSES MOVING ON THE SNOW In winter through the damp grass around the house there are horses moving on the snow in the half-light they move quickly following the fence until the mist takes them completely and evening is the hollow sound of hooves in the south field.

What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside can seem more like a constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others because they reside in a far too private chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily to travel off, but often the opposite, to have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe, even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish.

In some ways Coleridge committed a form of artistic suicide attempting to solve the complicated mystery he saw in the flocking starlings. In a harrowing self-indictment he later described himself as a 'starling self-encaged, & always in the moult, & my whole note is, tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow.' Slowly losing confidence in himself as a poet, he attempted to become an all-knowing philosopher-king. He ignored the simpler images central to his life as a poet and attempted to create an equally complex system of philosophy that would hold it all in place. He eventually produced the Biographia Literaria, an immense tome, impressive in learning, thought and scholarship, but in my heretical opinion as an unrepentant lyric poet, a tragedy of wasted effort and a loss to all of us compared to the vital geniums of his early poetry.

This happens in a parallel fashion to many skilled managers who convince themselves that the organization's vision is their own vision. They suddenly find themselves in positions that are seen as rewards for rather than consummations of their skill; their natural abilities may not translate into the job they have been promoted to, nor may their interest, but because of the pressure of the career path, they may convince themselves into a phantom life under an overarching system that includes everything except their own desires.