Selected Quotes from Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte. An excellent book about finding meaning in our work.

1. 1
“I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the
work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for
yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know.
They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it
really means.” - Joseph Conrad
cc: blentley - https://www.flickr.com/photos/8675898@N03

2. 2
Crossing the Unknown Sea – Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity
By David Whyte
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Sea-Work-Pilgrimage-
Identity/dp/1573229148/
cc: A Guy Taking Pictures - https://www.flickr.com/photos/80901381@N04

3. At its best work is never-ending only because, like life, it is a
pilgrimage, a journey in which we progress not only through
the world but through stages of understanding.
cc: skoeber - https://www.flickr.com/photos/29662240@N02cc: Lapse of the Shutter - https://www.flickr.com/photos/62171828@N08

4. 4
To view work as a pilgrimage is to put our hearts desires to
hazard, because my merely setting out, we have told
ourselves that there is something bigger and better , or even
smaller and better-above all , something more life giving- that
awaits us in our work, and we are going to seek it.
cc: plaits - https://www.flickr.com/photos/90198349@N04

5. 5
Crossing the unknown sea is meant to be an exploration and a
midnight conversation , a look at our present vision of work
and our ability to re-imagine ourselves; a sea voyage into
both our inherited notions of what work means to us and our
experiences and intuitions of what lies over the horizon. A
reminder that work is not static endpoint or a mere exercise
in providing, but a journey and a pilgrimage in which the core
elements of our being are tested in the world.
cc: Art Dino - https://www.flickr.com/photos/26589989@N02

6. If we are serious about work we tend to find ourselves apprenticed to
something much larger than we expected, something that calls on
more of our essence than we previously imagined, something
seemingly raw and overpowering.
cc: Maja_Larsson - https://www.flickr.com/photos/50030375@N02cc: Lunchbox Photography - https://www.flickr.com/photos/15066420@N00

7. One of the greater qualities of great
captains, great leaders, great bosses is
that they are unutterably themselves.
cc: Hamed Saber - https://www.flickr.com/photos/44124425616@N01

8. To wake the giant inside ourselves, we have to
be faithful to our own eccentric nature, and
bring it out into conversation with the world.
cc: Robert Gourley - https://www.flickr.com/photos/47646723@N00

9. We have to say no just as firmly as we say yes.
cc: Steve Snodgrass - https://www.flickr.com/photos/10710442@N08

10. The essence of midlife crisis is that something has to
change but the person feels he no longer has the
body, the will, or the energy to do it more.
cc: Zavarykin Sergey - https://www.flickr.com/photos/29263368@N05

11. 12
Every path , no matter how diligently we follow it, can lead to
staleness and ennui. We might reach dizzying heights in our
organization, occupy the top floor of any given building, or ,
as a zoologist, make it to the Galapagos islands, but if we lose
our horizon, our high office or our stories islands can seem
like a gilded cage.
cc: Zuhair Ahmad - https://www.flickr.com/photos/47691273@N06

12. 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 not path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself,
is in conversation with the elements.
cc: marfis75 - https://www.flickr.com/photos/45409431@N00

13. 14
I do believe in dignity and the preservation of personal honor.
I believe in dignity ; not in dignity's old shadow of puffery and
self-importance, but in its power to keep us true to our own
spirit. With dignity comes honesty and an unwillingness to
sell yourself short, to temporize or collude in cowardly ways
that may preserve our jobs, but not our honor.
cc: DFID - UK Department for International Development - https://www.flickr.com/photos/14214150@N02

14. We would stand barely a chance in the world if we did not
rely from cradle to grave on what has been handed down
from those who have lived and worked before us.
cc: [ henning ] - https://www.flickr.com/photos/43144679@N00

15. Real, undying loyalty in work can never be legislated or
coerced; it is based on a courageous vulnerability that invites
others by our example to a frontier conversation whose
outcome is yet in doubt.
cc: jhf - https://www.flickr.com/photos/30302697@N00

16. 18
We try to construct a life in which we will be perfect, in which
we will eliminate awkawardness, pass by vulnerability, ignore
ineptness, only to pass through the gate of our lives and ifnd,
strangely, that the gateway is vulnerability
itself.
cc: chuckp - https://www.flickr.com/photos/65484951@N00

17. We might be on a pilgrimage of identity in work, but
it is almost the prospect of arrival that keeps us
going rather than the journey itself.
cc: liquidnight - https://www.flickr.com/photos/47263829@N00

18. We must be careful what we ask for in our work, I
told myself, we may get it and most likely we will not
be prepared for it when it arrives.
cc: ** RCB ** - https://www.flickr.com/photos/29233640@N07

19. There is nothing stranger than success. The moment
the creature arrives, it subtly alters the very work we
did to become successful in the first place.
cc: Muzik Hounds - https://www.flickr.com/photos/57711005@N07

20. One of the distinguishing features of any courageous
human being is the ability to remain unutterably
themselves in the midst of conforming pressures.
cc: conform - https://www.flickr.com/photos/77739106@N00

21. To live with courage in any work or in any organization, we
must know intimately the part of us that does not give a
damn about the organization or the work.
cc: Theater der Künste - https://www.flickr.com/photos/31427152@N04

22. 24
Death is not impressed by what we have done, unless what
we have done leaves a legacy of life; deaths tide washes over
everything we have taken so long to write in the sand. What
is remembered in all our work is what is still alive in the
hearts and minds of others.
cc: Kamoteus (A New Beginning) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/21295125@N05

23. A healthy relationship with time is an exact template of a
healthy relationship between two human beings. Stress
means we have committed adultery with regard to our
marriage with time.
cc: Pranav Prakash - https://www.flickr.com/photos/71364282@N00

24. Sleep is re-creation, integration, renewal
and remembering, as our intuitions and
increasingly our science confirms.
cc: Tobyotter - https://www.flickr.com/photos/78428166@N00

25. I wish I understood the beauty in leaves
falling. To whom are we beautiful as we
go?
cc: -MRGT - https://www.flickr.com/photos/44284392@N04

26. 28
The multilevel discipline involved in good work is the road to
happiness and the pilgrimage to self-respect. Once the job is
done, we circle it, admire it --even if no one else can or will--
clean up and move on. Leaving the work to find its own place
in the world is the mark of a good workman, a good
workwoman.
cc: goarmyphotos - https://www.flickr.com/photos/55660512@N07

27. 29
Across the world there is a movement that is now beginning to push back
and respond to the hegemony of international corporate business needs.
The successful companies will be ones that do not merely lather lobbyists
and politicians with buckets of money in order to keep this new world at
bay, but the ones who are in conversation with this emerging alternate
vision.
cc: Thomas Hawk - https://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01

28. 29
In work as in life we must contemplate the loss of everything in order to
know we have to give; it is the essence of writing, the essence of working,
the essence of living; an essence that we look for by hazarding our best
gifts in the world, and in that perspective, all of us are young and have
the possibilities of the young until our last breath goes out.
cc: Thomas Hawk - https://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01cc: Zuhair Ahmad - https://www.flickr.com/photos/47691273@N06

29. Thank Youcc: Stuck in Customs - https://www.flickr.com/photos/95572727@N00