David Whyte Quotes

When I was about to turn 50, I went into a kind of personal revision and observed my own priorities and what led those priorities in my life. And many things that, in a way, were profound.

I am a firm believer that every few years one needs to shake one's life through a sieve, like a miner in the Yukon. The gold nuggets remain. The rest falls through like the soft earth it is.

I've had the longest mid-life crisis ever.

You don't have to travel, but I find extended travel to be a helpful tool for reexamining yourself and the constraints you've artificially placed on your life. It's easy to believe everything has to be done one way if you're always in one place around the same people.

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

I've never really taken more than four days off, so it was a lot for me to go away for three-and-a-half months. I went all over Europe. I walked on a whole bunch of beaches and I did a lot of thinking.

So I just took some time off. I was maybe going to do two or three years and it turned into five years. But certainly, I'd say it was the best thing I ever did. And now I come back to this whole thing really energized about it.

I've been things and seen places.

Once I turned 40, my whole life changed in the most mature - not boring way but much cooler way. I feel much more like an adult.

The vast majority of young people I meet would benefit so much from a year off. You should just go waste a year in exploring the beauty of the world and trying the craziest experiences you can.

I've learned a lot in life, travelling, living abroad, just in the school of life.

I learned many things in England. Above all, I learned that until you leave home, you don't know to appreciate what you have.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

There is no man more complete than the one who travelled a lot, who changed the shape of his thoughts and his life twenty times.

travel is compost for the mind

What have you done for YOURSELF this year to create a better life?

I am very glad I have travelled. Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one's prejudices.

A few years ago I wrote two versions of my obituary, the one I wanted and the one I was heading for. They were very different. I realized I needed to make some big changes if I was going to look back and be proud of my life. I am making those changes, and now I have a life worth living.

Without travel I would have wound up a little ignorant white Southern female, which was not my idea of a good life.

A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.

Nothing tends so much to enlarge the mind as traveling.

A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.

I beg young people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one.........the re are lessons that you can't get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people - Americans and Europeans - come back and go, "ohhhhh." And the lightbulb goes on.

The way I measure my life is 'Am I better than I was last year?'