Top 50 Quotes by David Whyte

We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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