David Whyte Quotes

I can't see the forest through the trees, except the trees are people.

If people would only look to the cookie, all our problems would be solved.

My worry is that the world is becoming more chaotic every day. My excitement is that more people paying attention to 'Less but better' could help solve our growing problems.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

They whirled past the dark trees, as feathers would be swept before a hurricane. Houses, gates, churches, hay-stacks, objects of every kind they shot by, with a velocity and noise like roaring waters suddenly let loose. Still the noise of pursuit grew louder, and still my uncle could hear the young lady wildly screaming, "Faster! Faster!"

The more you try to simplify things the more you complicate them. You create rules, build walls, push people away, lie to yourself and ignore true feelings. That is not simplifying things.

I want to be a person that isn't surrounded by their mail and their cat.

People are now looking at the world in terms of axis of evil and evil-doers and by logical extension good-doers, and that's a very polarised look at good and bad people. Reality is much more complex than that and people can be good and evil on the very same day.

Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.

If everything is amplified, we hear nothing.

I am trying to remember that things have certainly been crazier in human history and they may get crazier here and now, and [here I am trying to be optimistic] it's even a good thing, to be going through all of this, if only to be reminded that history hasn't stopped - human existence is as fundamentally unmanageable now as it ever was.

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.

There's always a lot happening. I mean, that's the thing about politics: it's just one damn thing after another!

CSNY is a little like putting seven pounds of stuff in a three pound bag.

Sometimes a simple question could have a complicated answer.

It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.

Some people will tell you that slow is good - but I'm here to tell you that fast is better.

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload.

Now, I meant to talk about something else earlier on, and I've forgotten what it was. I've remembered what it is again, but I've also forgotten. And that's really what adult life is like most of the time.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

When I asked my mother, ‘how do I tell people about you’ her answer was ‘tell the truth’. But of course, the truth is never simple.

We focus a lot on the quality of experience, speed, reliability. It’s not sexy from a lot of people’s perspective, it’s not glitzy in the feature set, but it’s what people come to rely on.

We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today.