David Whyte Quotes

I wondered how they would top the Pirates and skeletons and moonlight, because that's a pretty cool concept.

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson.

When I'm an audience member I do not want to go and see something that I already know, I want to see something that I don't know. I want to be surprised and stimulated to think about something. I want the magic. I want to be in a situation of uncertainty; that's what excites me.

One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which prompts reflection and random reverie.

Film remains completely mystical and mysterious to me.

Ultimately, theatre is about creating a sense of wonder, and I think wonder is achieved not by a kind of wide-eyed silliness but by being available to that which is most unknown, inside the material and inside yourself.

Do not imagine that art or anything else is other than high magic! - is a system of holy hieroglyph. The artist, the initiate, thus frames his mysteries. The rest of the world scoff, or seek to understand, or pretend to understand; some few obtain the truth.

Music is the noise that surrounds the stillness of the art form.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

The art of a magician is to create wonder. If we live with a sense of wonder, our lives become filled with joy.

I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33”, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page.

The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.

The artist brain is the sensory brain: sight and sound, smell and taste, touch. These are the elements of magic, and magic is the elemental stuff of art. In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do-spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.

You see so many beautiful things happening in this world, and you see so many things that make you want to cry and crawl under a rock. But there's an underlying feeling of magic and mystery in everything that I live for. I feel like all of my art is trying to get people to see that underlying, subtle energy that lives within everything that we see and what we don't see in this world.

You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of.

When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.

Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

Create, artist, do not talk.

Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.

comedy is a high form of art becaus it brings us more joy than anything else, practically but at the same time, it doesn't get a lot of respect. that's the sacrifice you make to do it.

It takes a certain amount of courage to let the field lie fallow until you have something to say.

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.

[Rewriting is] a whole other art form; it's about craftsmanship.