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The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship QUOTES

The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship QUOTES

1 " We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

2 " Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don’t mistake other people’s questions for your own. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

3 " Jane Austen never did marry. Why doesthat statement call for such reflexive pity? It carries a diferent meaning if we follow it up: Jane Austen never did marry, and therefore she was given the time and perspective to produce books as well-written as those by anyone who ever lived."

-David Whyte "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

4 " The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

5 " Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

6 " Feeling far away from what we want tells us one of two things about our work: that we are at the beginning or that we have forgotten where we were going. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

7 " work and life are not separate things and therefore cannot be balanced against each other except to create further trouble. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

8 " What we love in other human beings is the hoped-for satisfaction of our desire, we do not love them for their desire. If what we loved in them was their desire, then we should love them as our self.” When "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

9 " We each have a particular way of shaping ourselves in the world. To take on someone else’s conversational style and to keep repeating other people’s questions as if they were our own is to exhaust ourselves. It doesn’t matter if it is the thoughts of Socrates or Susan Sontag. Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

10 " The pursuit of the self is the pursuit of that part of us not defined by our worries and anxieties. But this pursuit begins only by admitting that human anxiety is endless and to be expected. These waves of existential anxiety may knock down the surface self, but there is another, deeper self with a larger perspective that was never knocked down at all. The pursuit of the self is the pursuit of this non-self, one large enough to hold the necessary losses of a human life. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

11 " Work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself. It is a place full of powerful undercurrents, a place to find our selves, but also, a place to drown, losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

12 " There is no possibility of pursuing a work without coming to terms with all the ways it is impossible to do it. Feeling far away from what we want tells us one of two things about our work: that we are at the beginning or that we have "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

13 " Life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something other than you own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn't based on triumphing over it or complaining about it. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

14 " The marriage of work has everything to do with the romance of the everyday. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

15 " What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside can seem more like a constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others because they reside in a far too private chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily to travel off, but often the opposite, to have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe, even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

16 " work is achieved not by creating a hermetic space sealed off from the world, but nel mezzo, in the middle of everything. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

17 " In building a work life, people who follow rules, written or unwritten, too closely and in an unimaginative way are often suffocated by those same rules and die by them, quite often unnoticed and very often unmourned. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

18 " Only those who put more energy into self-pity than into paying attention are truly marooned. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

19 " The interesting dynamic about human happiness in the marriage to work is that we can glide down the road in the metaphorical Jaguar XK 150, having a completely miserable, blazing argument with our partner while the wind is blowing unheeded through our hair. I can also find myself in the aptly name Ford Focus, laughing my way into a marvelous excursion. But neither Ford Focus nor Jaguar can guarantee us a place in the kingdom of happiness. It is the one in the driver's set, setting the destination and the attitude for the journey of work and vocation, who seems to make up our real possibilities for satisfaction over time.

The difficult truth is that our kingdom does not have to be very big at all in order for us to do good work: what is difficult is simply starting the work and carrying on with it day after day. My work space can be a small corner of a table on a train or if we are really, really focused, a knee on which to balance a writing pad. "

― David Whyte , The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship