David Whyte Quotes

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds.

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself

Do not think too deeply about these things - gradually they will become clearer to you

The experience taught me to be present in the real Buddhist sense of paying attention to the moment.

My life philosophy and personality has been driven by the fact that I am incapable of really understanding the future, on some level. I am in this moment. I take risks because I really don't think that far ahead.

Leave your thoughtlessness behind you then you may begin to understand. Clear the emptiness around you with the waving of your hand.

Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.

The more I see, the less I know.

I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.

Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.

How do we know if our practice is a real practice? Only by one thing: more and more, we just see the wonder. What is the wonder? I don't know. We can't know such things through thinking. But we always know it when it's there.

The more knowledge, the clearer what the doubts are.

It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees - this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better.

I think that being mindful of your own biases tends to lead you into ambiguity, not clarity, and that following those ambiguities is the only way to approach the universal.

At night my mind does not much care if what it thinks is here or there. It tells me stories, it invents and makes up things that don't make sense. I do not know why it does this stuff. The real world seems quite weird enough.

Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

No, you don't get it, thats why I'm telling you. You think you get it, which isn't the same as actually getting it. Get it? (Kakashi)

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!