David Whyte Quotes

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

There is such a thing as truth, but we have a vested interest in not seeing it, in avoiding it.

I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

The world will always choose convenience over reality. It's easier to hate, blame, and fear than it is to understand. No one wants the truth; they want entertainment.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

Only fools imagine they are already awake. How clearly they understand everything! How easily they distinguish this deception from that reality!

We seem to prefer a comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. We punish those who point out reality, and reward those who provide us with the comfort of illusion. Reality is fearsome .. but experience tells us that more fearsome yet is evading it.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

A form of self-delusion.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

I don't lie; I improve on my life.

In no way did I allow reality as it was to intrude on reality as I wanted it to be.

That is what I was more drawn to - creating stories while changing and altering reality.

Realize that the surface personality has no interest in anything which might disturb its darling delusions.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.