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All Quotes by author - 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. "

" A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. "

" 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. "

" A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want. "

" A soul-based workplace asks things of me that I didn't even know I had. It's constantly telling me that I belong to something large in the world. "

" 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. "

" Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed. "

" 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. "

" Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story; we do not know where we are in the story. We do not know who, ultimately, is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. "

" Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and 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. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. "

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

" I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves. "

" I don't have an all-embracing vision which people have to buy. I'm simply trying to work with the struggles we all deal with every day while we're trying to live out our personal destinies and make a living at the same time. "

" If you've given away a sense of your own destiny, you need enormous amounts of hierarchy and protection within the structure to make up for what you've given away. "

" I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement. "

" 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. "

" In the poetic tradition, the heart's affections are indeed holy, and if organizations are asking for people's hearts and minds, they are asking in a way for their holy and hidden affections at the same time. "

" It is difficult to be creative and enthusiastic about anything for which we do not feel affection. "

" It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear. "

" 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. "

" It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. "

" Lion sounds that have not grown from the mouse may exude naked power... but cannot convey any wisdom or understanding... The initial steps on the path to courageous speech then are the first tentative steps into the parts of us that cannot speak. "

" One of the great difficulties as you rise up through an organisation is that your prior competencies are exploded and broken apart by the territory you've been promoted into: the field of human identity. "

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

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

" Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising. "

" 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. "

" Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation. "

" Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation. "

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