Crossing the Unknown Sea Quotes

“You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? … The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”
― David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

“Desire demands only a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field which surrounds us and from which we can recharge ourselves every moment, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.”
― David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

“Humiliation is mostly something we try to avoid, but it is something more often, all for the best, in retrospect. There is a lovely root to the word, the Latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returned to the ground of our being. Any fancy ideas we have about ourselves are shriven away by the reality of the moment. We come to earth with a thump. It may be a narrow piece of ground, but at least it is real and at least it is our own.”
― David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

“Any life, & any life's work, is a hidden journey, a secret code, deciphered in fits & starts. The details only given truth by the whole, & the whole dependent on the details."

"...having the powerful characteristics of captaincy or leadership of any form is almost always an outward sign of a person inhabiting their physical body & the deeper elements of their own nature.”
― David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

“The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest but wholeheartedness”
― David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

“Good work, done well for the right reasons...”
― David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity