To some extent, while we think we are simply driving to work every morning to earn a living, the soul knows it is secretly engaged in a life-or-death struggle for its existence.
—David Whyte
Help is strangely, something we want to do without, as if the very idea disturbs and blurs the boundaries of our individual endeavors, as if we cannot face how much we need in order to go on.
—David Whyte
What we are actually about to become or are afraid of becoming always trumps and rules over what we think we are already.
—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
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
Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.
—David Whyte
A true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place.
—David Whyte
You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? … The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.
—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
Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.
—David Whyte
Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.
—David Whyte
It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with, it is the mother of the thing you fear. The very thing that has given birth to the nightmare.
—David Whyte
Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.
—David Whyte
If I can reduce my work to just a job I have to do, then I keep myself safely away from the losses to be endured in putting my heart’s desires at stake.
—David Whyte
The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears.
—David Whyte
Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world.
—David Whyte
To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.
—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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Kate Winslet English Actress
- Daniel Day-Lewis English Actor
- Robert Ranke Graves British Writer
- Al Alvarez English Critic, Poet, Novelist
- John Eliot American Psychologist
- John Aikin British Educator
- Audrey Hepburn Belgian-British Actress
- John Lennon British Singer
- Mary Wollstonecraft English Writer, Feminist
- Joan Collins English Actress
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