David Whyte

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

“Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.”

“The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.”

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

“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.”

“When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.”

“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.”

“Things have a way of being richer in the end, a product better made, for the circuitous route we take to include all the elements that are necessary for a job well done.”

“The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Sincere regret may be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own.”

“Sometimes you have to make a complete disaster of your life in such an epic way that it will be absolutely clear to you what you've been doing.”