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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Popular quotes

“Perhaps courage is simply this spur-of-the-moment acts when your head screams don't, but your body does it anyway.”
― A.J. Betts, quote from Zac and Mia

“10 things to know about Syn 1. I hate people, even myself. 2. I only tolerate my friends and I can count those on one hand. 3. So what if I drink? I like my comfortably numb state and it keeps me from killing you. 4. Money can't buy happiness, but it's better than being poor and miserable. 5. We're all victims. 6. I like to choose my own poison. 7. I'm through reinventing myself. I'm on the third incarnation now and it sucks as much as the other two. 8. I have all the friends money can buy. 9. I only trust one man who doesn't return the gesture. 10. I can steal anything, anywhere, any time. Sober or drunk, I'm the best at what I do. ”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Born of Fire

“I'm playing along. With what strength I have left, I try to reassure them that the rest I'm getting is healing me. But what I really am is finished, and there's no cure for that. I've collapsed like a pile of bones.

Where does think become fat? Where does success become failure? Where does a great future become a horrible past full of heartache and regret?”
― quote from Elena Vanishing

“Think of a "discovery" as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later point in time to an earlier time. The discovery's value does not equal the value of the information discovered but rather the value of having the information available earlier than it otherwise would have been. A scientist or a mathematician may show great skill by being the first to find a solution that has eluded many others; yet if the problem would soon have been solved anyway, then the work probably has not much benefited the world [unless having a solution even slightly sooner is immensely valuable or enables further important and urgent work].”
― Nick Bostrom, quote from Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“The kiss is sweeter than sin and fiercer than temptation. I am not gentle, I am not kind; I am rough and wild and savage.”
― S. Jae-Jones, quote from Wintersong

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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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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