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.

- David Whyte

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

- David Whyte

To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life; fully experienced, it turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past.

- David Whyte

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

- 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.

- David Whyte

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

- David Whyte

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

- David Whyte

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

- David Whyte

To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible - that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins.

- David Whyte

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.

- David Whyte

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

- David Whyte

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

- David Whyte

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.

- David Whyte

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.

- David Whyte

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.

- David Whyte

The greatest luxury of having money should be not having to worry about it.

- David Whyte

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.

- David Whyte

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.

- David Whyte

The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.

- David Whyte

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.

- David Whyte