This page lists some of the all-time best David Whyte quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Poetry & Language Quotes
- Inquiry & Identity Quotes
- Vulnerability & Innocence Quotes
- Regret & Honesty Quotes
- Attention & Aloneness Quotes
50+ David Whyte Quotes on Poetry, Identity, Vulnerability, & More
David Whyte Quotes on Poetry & Language
“Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.” — David Whyte
“I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had.” — David Whyte
“You can inhabit language in very, very different ways. Language can live in your body in a way in which it can open up different worlds to you.” — David Whyte
“The deeper discipline of poetry is overhearing yourself say things you didn’t want to know about the world, and something that actually emancipates you from the smaller self out into this larger dispensation that you actually didn’t think you deserved.” — David Whyte
“Poetry is not an abstract art, it’s the way human beings speak when they’re on their intimate edge … It’s speaking from the live edge between what you think is you and what you think is not you … The surprise you feel in good poetry is that physical arresting—it arrests the whole body—stealing you for revelation.” — David Whyte
“The ability of good poetry is not to create some ideal world where you’re going to this perfect representation. It’s to be just yourself.” — David Whyte
“One of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence through attentive speech—speech that says something in such a way that it appears as a third frontier between you and the world, and invites you into a deeper and more generous sense of your own identity and the identity of the world.” — David Whyte
“The marvelous thing about poetry is you only need to read one line. One line a day—truly read—has an enormous affect on grounding yourself in reality … It’s meeting this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you—which is where all the real stuff happens.” — David Whyte
“Poetry is the verbal art form by which we can actually create silence.” — David Whyte
“(Poetry) is the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn’t know you knew.” — David Whyte
David Whyte Quotes on Inquiry & Identity
“I often define a beautiful question as one that shapes your identity as much by asking it as by having it answered.” — David Whyte
“A beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. So, the ability to ask beautiful questions—often in very un-beautiful moments—is one of the great disciplines of a human life. A beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. You don’t have to do anything about it, you just have to keep asking. Before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.” — David Whyte
“All you have to do is ask yourself, ‘What’s the conversation I don’t want to have?’ That’s it. That’s where you should go.” — David Whyte
“Stop the conversation you’re having now so you can drink from a deeper well.” — David Whyte
“That sense of being abducted out of your present identity—stolen away—I think is necessary for all human beings.” — David Whyte
“Science, rightly, is always trying to remove the ‘I.’ But, I was really interested in the way that the ‘I’ deepened the more you paid attention.” — David Whyte
“I began to realize that my identity depended, not upon any beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself—and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.” — David Whyte
“The only place where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you … It’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level.” — David Whyte
“The object in meditation, and all of our contemplative disciplines, is silence. But, really that silence is in order for you to perceive something other than yourself, or what you’ve arranged as yourself—to actually perceive this frontier between what you call a self and what you call other than yourself.” — David Whyte
“We shape ourselves to fit this world and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause, to produce the miraculous.” — David Whyte
“We have so many allies in this world, including just the color blue in the sky, which we’re not paying attention to, or the breeze or the ground beneath our feet. And so this is an invitation to come out of abstraction and back into the world again.” — David Whyte
“Your genius is just the way everything is met in you … All the struggles of your grandparents and your parents in arriving together and giving birth to your parents and giving birth to you, the landscape in which you were nurtured, the dialect or language in which you were educated into the world, the smells of the local environment … (Genius) is the innate gift … It’s the way everything meets inside me.” — David Whyte
David Whyte Quotes on Vulnerability & Innocence
“Will you become a full citizen of vulnerability, loss, and disappearance, which you have no choice about?” — David Whyte
“We tend to think of vulnerability as a weakness, but it’s really interesting to think of it as the place where you’re open to the world whether you want to be or not.” — David Whyte
“The only way you can stop being vulnerable is to stop caring.” — David Whyte
“One form of robust vulnerability is having a sense of humor about yourself … A sense of humor is a kind of spiritual practice in a way. A sense of humor always tells you that whatever context you have arranged for yourself, there is always another context that makes your context absurd.” — David Whyte
“Where there’s no vulnerability in the conversation, there is actually no conversation.” — David Whyte
“A good marriage and a good friendship is a product of our willingness to be fully vulnerable, but also to find the right person with whom to be fully vulnerable … The relationship advances along the axis of your mutual vulnerability.” — David Whyte
“The ultimate touchstone of friendship 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.” — David Whyte
“There is no sincere path a human being can take where we won’t have our hearts broken. We can only choose to take the path that we really care about.” — David Whyte
“One of the interesting qualities of being human is, by the look of it, we’re the only part of creation that can actually refuse to be ourselves.” — David Whyte
“You do have an incredibly lazy, deathly afraid part of you that’s reluctant to engage with reality. Every human being has the right to turn away from the courageous conversation because life is full of so much disappearance, death, loss, grief, ill health—and the loss of people and places that are so heartbreaking. Every human being at one time or another in their existence says, ‘Listen, God’—and even if you don’t believe in God you say, ‘Listen, God’—’if this is the game you want me to play, I’m not going to play it. It’s too heartbreaking. It’s too painful. I’m going to actually turn my face elsewhere, and I’m going to make a little artificial world of my own where I don’t feel life with the keenness that I did with my last heartbreak. I’m going to create a little insulated video game of my own. It’s one of the reasons video games are so addictive especially for the young masculine psyche—you can restart the game if you feel you’re going to die, you can buy the invisibility cloak that allows you not to be seen, not to be touched. All of us have our versions of that little video game at times in life because human beings need respite.” — David Whyte
“I think one of the great necessities of self-knowledge is understanding and even tasting the single malt essence of your own reluctance to be here: all the ways you don’t want to have the conversation, all the ways you don’t want to be in the marriage, you don’t want to be a parent, you don’t want to be visible in a leadership position, you don’t want to be doing this work. And this is not to give it away. This is just to understand what lies between you and a sense of freedom in it. And I think self-compassion has to do with this ability to understand and even to cultivate a sense of humor about all the ways you just don’t want to be here—so to embody your reluctance and, therefore, once it’s embodied, to allow it to actually start to change into something else.” — David Whyte
“Things only solidify when they’re kept at a distance. As soon as they’re embodied, they actually start to take on a kind of seasonality. And you’re actually, by embodying it, by feeling it fully, allowing it to start to change into something else.” — David Whyte
“A good elegy, looking at it from the poetic point of view, is always a conversation between grief and celebration: the grief of the loss of the person, and the celebration that you were here at all to share the planet with them.” — David Whyte
“The only cure for grief is grief itself. Grief is its own cure … It asks us to feel it fully, to feel the complete absence.” — David Whyte
“Innocence is what we allow to be gifted back to us once we’ve given ourselves away.” — David Whyte
“Innocence is the ability to be found by the world you’re now inhabiting.” — David Whyte
“Innocence is your ability to be found by the world in increasingly larger and larger ways.” — David Whyte
David Whyte Quotes on Regret & Honesty
“There’s no life you can live without regret. The only question is will you actually feel your regret to its fullest because the proper regret puts you into a better relationship to the future.” — David Whyte
“Regret could actually be a kind of faculty for living more positively into the future.” — David Whyte
“We always hide our future from ourselves because that future is always slightly terrifying to the person we are now.” — David Whyte
“The thing about the past is it’s not the past. It’s right here, in this room, in this conversation.” — David Whyte
“A well-felt sadness in life can be just as generative as a well-felt joy.” — David Whyte
“The whole of creation seems to be made up of endless invitations—things meeting us that are inviting us to be a certain way in their presence. Everything’s an invitation to the next step, to the next emancipation of your life. I don’t think you can fully regret something without immediately precipitating out this sense that you’ve actually entered a new epoch in your life—you’ve emancipated yourself from that imprisonment you were in before.” — David Whyte
“Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.” — David Whyte
“Honesty is grounded in humility, and indeed in humiliation—in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.” — David Whyte
“Life will take care of humiliating you into your maturity.” — David Whyte
David Whyte Quotes on Attention & Aloneness
“Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.” — David Whyte
“The deepening of any form of attention is that the background starts to become just as important as the foreground.” — David Whyte
“Silence is this radical letting alone—letting alone of yourself, of your mind, of your body, of the threshold you’re on right now—so that it can speak back to you in its own words, its own form.” — David Whyte
“Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.” — David Whyte
“John O’Donohue used to say that one of the necessary tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself and the world—letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.” — David Whyte
“Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.” — David Whyte
“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
“Life is this constant invitation to a radical form of simplification—of giving away peripheral complications to get down to the essence of it.” — David Whyte
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