David Whyte

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 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.

The ultimate lesson is that there is no immunity, no matter our age or the size of our retirement account, from going through constant cycles of integration and disintegration in which we are humbled and hopefully set to rights with the world again.

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

There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.

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.

There are many tough conversations, but one of the most difficult is between a parent and an adolescent daughter, partly because as a parent we are almost always attempting to relate to someone who is no longer there.

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

Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. Pay attention to everything in the world as if it's alive. Realize everything has its own discrete existence outside your story. By doing this, you open to gifts and lessons that the world has to give you.

Genius is becoming something you were all along.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet_x000D_ confinement of your aloneness_x000D_ to learn_x000D_ anything or anyone_x000D_ that does not bring you alive_x000D_ is too small for you.

To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

Desire demands only a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field which surrounds us and from which we can recharge ourselves every moment, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.

I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.

Being young and trying to catch a glimpse of the depths, of the true self, of the soul, or whatever human beings have called it over the centuries, we often find ourselves surrounded by bossy, hectoring voices trying to short-circuit our personal experience by super-imposing their own disappointments. Much of this bossiness masquerades as an education.

Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom.

You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds Except the one in which you belong.