Quotes from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“Forgiveness is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw centre, to reimagine our relation to it.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming at all.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavour; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“The true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love of a child, a partner, a work, or a road we have to take against the odds.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“Ambition left to itself, like a Rupert Murdoch, always becomes tedious, its only object the creation of larger and larger empires of control; but a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. We find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had undertaken the journey.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance...”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter's face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“FRIENDSHIP is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose.

[…]

Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.”
― David Whyte, quote from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

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“В быстролётные годы расцвета женской красоты она отлично служит притворству, к которому вынуждает женщину её природная слабость и законы нашего общества. Чудесный, свежий цвет лица, блеск глаз, изящный рисунок тонких черт, богатство линий, резких или округлых, но чистых и совершенно законченных, — завеса для всех её сокровенных волнений; если она покраснеет, это не выдаст движения её души, а только оживит и без того яркие краски; огонь её глаз, горящих жизнью, в ту пору скрадывает все внутренние вспышки, и пламя страданий, вырываясь на миг, делает её ещё пленительнее. Итак, нет ничего более непроницаемого, чем молодое лицо, ибо нет ничего неподвижнее. Лицо молодой женщины безмятежно, гладко, ясно, как поверхность дремлющего озера. Своеобразие начинает появляться в женском лице лишь к тридцати годам. До этого возраста художнику не найти в нём ничего, кроме бело-розовых красок, улыбок и выражения, которое повторяет одну и ту же мысль, — мысль о радостях молодости и любви, мысль однообразную и неглубокую; но в старости, когда женщина всё уже испытала, следы страстей словно врезаются в лицо её; она была любовницей, супругой, матерью; самые сильные проявления счастья и горя в конце концов меняют облик человека, искажают черты, бороздя лицо неисчислимыми морщинами, наделяя каждую из них своим языком; и женщина становится тогда величественной в своём страдании, прекрасной в печали своей, великолепной в своей невозмутимости, и если нам позволено будет развить наше необычайное сравнение, то в высохшем озере станут тогда видны следы всех родников, питавших его; тогда лицо женщины уже не привлечёт внимания света, ибо в легкомыслии своём свет будет напуган тем, что разрушены его привычные понятия о красоте; не привлечёт оно и посредственного, ничего не смыслящего художника, зато вдохновит истинного поэта, того, кто наделён чувством прекрасного, кто свободен от всех условностей, на которых зиждется столько ложных понятий об искусстве и красоте.
Люди несчастные, привыкшие взывать к небу с мольбой об утешении в горестях жизни, сразу бы распознали по взгляду этой женщины, что и для неё молитва является единственным прибежищем в повседневных страданиях и что у неё ещё кровоточат те тайные раны, от которых гибнут все цветы души, вплоть до материнских чувств. У живописца есть краски для таких портретов, но никакими словами не передать их; сущность лица, его выражение — само по себе явление необъяснимое, и лишь зрение помогает нам уловить его; у писателя есть только один способ дать представление о страшных переменах, происшедших во внешности его героев: он должен рассказать о тех событиях, из-за которых они появились. Всё в этой женщине говорило о бесшумной ледяной грозе, о тайной борьбе между героизмом страдающей матери и убожеством наших чувств, недолговечных, как и мы сами, в которых нет ничего вечного.
Люди хорошо воспитанные, и особенно женщины, скрытны в проявлении своих чувств, и о волнении их сердца догадается лишь тот, кому довелось испытать в жизни всё, что испытывала исстрадавшаяся мать.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from A Woman Of Thirty

“I don't want her thinking about the baby right now, but I can't pass by the hump without paying it homage. My lips press against it once, reverently.”
― Emma Chase, quote from Twisted

“It's just that every story of woe and tragedy throughout history starts out with those exact same three words. ‘There's this girl”
― Mia Sheridan, quote from Finding Eden

“And so, pointing fingers become pointing guns, because nobody listens to fingers.”
― Jeff Shaara, quote from Gods and Generals

“Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”
― Rob Bell, quote from Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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