David Whyte Quotes

...wanting soul life without the dark, warming intelligence of personal doubt is like expecting an egg without the brooding heat of the mother hen.

~ David Whyte

Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavour; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.

~ David Whyte

Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.

~ David Whyte

Forgiveness is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw centre, to reimagine our relation to it.

~ David Whyte

In Germany, they have great difficulty with anything that smacks of cultism or messianic leadership. You can't talk about leadership in its charismatic forms.

~ David Whyte

Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.

~ David Whyte

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.

~ David Whyte

All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone - and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.

~ David Whyte

Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

~ David Whyte

The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.

~ David Whyte

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

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

~ David Whyte

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

~ David Whyte

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

~ David Whyte

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

~ David Whyte