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.
David WhyteRead
There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.
Interpretation
Humiliation can lead to personal grounding and self-reflection.
In this quote, David Whyte suggests that the experience of humiliation serves as a profound reminder of our essential humanity. Derived from the Latin root meaning 'soil' or 'ground', humiliation can strip away our pretenses and bring us back to our core, encouraging humility and introspection as we navigate our emotions and relationships.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity, one might use this quote to highlight the strength found in vulnerability.
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.
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.
The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears
The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.
We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.
There are no journalistic ethics that transcend the value of human life. There are none. In a situation where you can save a human life, you must. There isn't any conflict in my mind.
It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.
See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.
While we wait for life, life passes
Whether we're Democrats or Republicans or independents, we have to learn to hang together or we're gonna hang separately.
History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
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