Mark Nepo Quotes

#1. I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

Mark Nepo

#2. The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.

Mark Nepo

#3. Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.

Mark Nepo

#4. Patience devastates us with the truth that, in essence, when we fear another, we fear ourselves; when we distrust another, we distrust ourselves; when we hurt another, we hurt ourselves; when we kill another, we kill ourselves.

Mark Nepo

#5. When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.

Mark Nepo

#6. I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.

Mark Nepo

#7. being articulate is not a facility of language but a fidelity to vision. And so we are all articulate when finding the courage to say what we see.

Mark Nepo

#8. The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.

Mark Nepo

#9. I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling.

Mark Nepo

#10. If I dare to hear you
I will feel you like the sun
And grow in your direction.

Mark Nepo

#11. Through the opened heart, the world comes rushing in, the way oceans fill the smallest hole along the shore. It is the quietest sort of miracle: by simply being who we are, the world will come to fill us, to cleanse us, to baptize us, again and again.

Mark Nepo

#12. In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.

Mark Nepo

#13. There is no tomorrow, only a string of todays. Still,

Mark Nepo

#14. Perhaps the hardest thing I've learned, and still struggle with, is that I don't have to be finished in order to be whole.

Mark Nepo

#15. For only while telling the truth does the truth lighten us. When we stop, it turns massive. I left some of my bags on that corner of Green Street somewhere below the equator. Now I carry less and try to dance on my crutches. For only while loving do the pains of feeling lighten.

Mark Nepo

#16. Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live.

Mark Nepo

#17. For only when we can outwait the dark will the sharpness of experience recede like a tide to reveal what has survived beneath it all. Often what seems tragic, if looked at long enough, reveals itself as part of a larger transformation.

Mark Nepo

#18. Listening reminds me how precious it is to be here at all. And so, listening is the first step to peace, both inner peace and the compassion that connects people.

Mark Nepo

#19. If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.

Mark Nepo

#20. We travel so far only to land where we are. We imagine other lives, only to meet who we are. We seek out love in special ways, only to find everyone is special. Humbly, we can't avoid this journey ...

Mark Nepo

#21. We need to give up what no longer works and find new ways of being that keeps us close to what matters.

Mark Nepo

#22. Once waking into the realization that eternity is waiting in every moment, I discovered that wealth is time, not money.

Mark Nepo

#23. As the seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way.

Mark Nepo

#24. To love by admitting our connection to everything is how we stay well.

Mark Nepo

#25. I would rather be fooled than not believe.

Mark Nepo

#26. Mysteriously, as elusive as it is, this moment
where the eye is what it sees, where the heart is what it feels
this moment shows us that what is real is sacred

Mark Nepo

#27. This is the ongoing purpose of full attention: to find a thousand ways to be pierced into wholeness.

Mark Nepo

#28. We are love. But in an everyday setting we have to make choices. We have limits. We can love everyone and we can't love everyone.

Mark Nepo

#29. All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.

Mark Nepo

#30. How often do we lose sight of what we're really after, insisting on all or nothing, when there is so much abundance wherever we are and so many opportunities that can help us on our way?

Mark Nepo

#31. Who's to say the effort to be real isn't the beginning of wings?

Mark Nepo

#32. What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.

Mark Nepo

#33. A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it

Mark Nepo

#34. Living is a conversation with no end, a dance with no steps, a song with no words, a reason too big for any mind.

Mark Nepo

#35. Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.

Mark Nepo

#36. The many ways to listen have been reaching into me for years. To enter deep listening, I've had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning. I've had to lean into all I don't understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear.

Mark Nepo

#37. The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.

Mark Nepo

#38. In a world where the great technologies enable us to record, replay, cut and paste, zoom in, and delete, listening is the crucial commitment to keep the heart touchable.

Mark Nepo

#39. Meditation, in all its forms and traditions, is an invitation to listen, to open, to quietly enlist the courage to be touched and formed by life.

Mark Nepo

#40. I laugh when I think of how many hours I have spent in my life weaving storylines that never came true until, like weeds, they covered my heart.

Mark Nepo

#41. In daily terms, the work of listening is to be constantly worn free of our preconceptions and preferences so that nothing stands in the way of our direct experience of life.

Mark Nepo

#42. Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.

Mark Nepo

#43. The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.

Mark Nepo

#44. I was a very driven person, wanting to help and to do good, hopefully to write and teach in a meaningful way - wanting to make change. And I discovered humbly that life was changing me.

Mark Nepo

#45. We need to meet, embrace and work with what we're given. For what we want and what we're given often serve two different gods. And how we respond to their meeting determines our path.

Mark Nepo

#46. In truth, always needing to stay immediate by removing what is no longer real is the working inner definition of sacrifice
giving up with reverence and compassion what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred.

Mark Nepo

#47. To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource.

Mark Nepo

#48. So many times, in our despair, we see our pain as something that will never end. In fact, this often defines our moments of despair: when we believe that our pain contains the rest of us. In contrast, there is this sense of peace to work toward: the belief that our life contains our pain.

Mark Nepo

#49. Truth is a seed hidden in the days until watered by what life brings us.

Mark Nepo

#50. Let's be in awe
which doesn't mean
anything but the courage
to gape like fish at the surface
breaking around our mouths
as we meet the air.

Mark Nepo

#51. Misery If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective.

Mark Nepo

#52. Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind.

Mark Nepo

#53. I tried so hard to please that I never realized no one is watching.

Mark Nepo

#54. Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.

Mark Nepo

#55. When we don't get what we want, there's a legitimate grieving, and then the spiritual journey truly begins, because not getting what we want breaks our self-reference; and once that is broken, we are aware that we are a part of a larger whole. It changes everything.

Mark Nepo

#56. Can we listen to each other the way veins listen to blood?

Mark Nepo

#57. Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.

Mark Nepo

#58. Before we can count we are taught to be grateful for what others do. As we are broken open by our experience, we begin to be grateful for what is, and if we live long enough and deep enough and authentically enough, gratitude becomes a way of life.

Mark Nepo

#59. The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.

Mark Nepo

#60. If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.

Mark Nepo

#61. When wiggling through a hole
the world looks different than
when scrubbed clean by the wiggle
and looking back.

Mark Nepo

#62. I am more than I have shown you and more than you are willing to see. Let's work our love and know each other more fully.

Mark Nepo

#63. I had over twenty years ago damaged the cilia in my ears. This has taught me many things. One thing I learned, paradoxically, is that there is much to be heard in silence.

Mark Nepo

#64. The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again.

Mark Nepo

#65. If we devote ourselves to the life at hand, the rest will follow. For life, it seems, reveals itself through those willing to live. Anything else, no matter how beautiful, is just advertising.

Mark Nepo

#66. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.

Mark Nepo

#67. No amount of thinking can stop thinking.

Mark Nepo

#68. There is no getting around the fundamental fact that we need to interact with everything in order to manifest the wholeness we are born with.

Mark Nepo

#69. The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.

Mark Nepo

#70. The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.

Mark Nepo

#71. In truth, our aliveness depends on our ability to sustain wonder:
to lengthen the moments we are truly uncovered, to be still and quiet
till all the elements of the earth and all the secrets of the oceans
stir the aspects of life waiting within us.

Mark Nepo

#72. A love astounds us or a pain consumes us and we forget that we glow on our own.

Mark Nepo

#73. Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.

Mark Nepo

#74. Given to air alone, the cuts of this world burn. But when we dare to enter what is deep, the bruises we carry soften and glow. In truth, the more we accept our limitations and surrender to the depths below our woundedness, the more the vastness holds us up. There is no way to know this but to dive.

Mark Nepo

#75. There's no need to seek the truth-just put a stop to your opinions!
-SENG-TS'AN

Mark Nepo

#76. For listening to the stories of others ... is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name.

Mark Nepo

#77. Accepting what we're given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.

Mark Nepo

#78. over time, staying real becomes the work of keeping our actions in the world connected to the truth of our inner being, allowing our True Self to see the light of day.

Mark Nepo

#79. Let the miracles, even the ones we don't want or see, unfold.

Mark Nepo

#80. The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.

Mark Nepo

#81. Being human, we are constantly broken apart by experience. To reconcile our humanness means we are ever learning how to accept our suffering and to restore our Wholeness.

Mark Nepo

#82. To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.

Mark Nepo

#83. There is a gravity of spirit that pulls the essence of who we are into being. Our job, like all our sister creatures, is to find the abundance of air and water and light, and to unfold what is already within us.

Mark Nepo

#84. When we need it most, it is nearly impossible to see ourselves with compassion from the slit of a narrowed mind all tensed for battle.

Mark Nepo

#85. The simplest and bravest way to counter the plight of disheartenment is to move toward what is precious.

Mark Nepo

#86. In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones. - PABLO NERUDA

Mark Nepo

#87. In a world that lives like a fist
mercy is not more than waking
with your hands open.

Mark Nepo

#88. In the way that I experience life, the physical world is really just the tip of the iceberg of reality. Whether it's trees or stones or water or animals or stars, everything has an ineffable interior quality.

Mark Nepo

#89. For though we stubbornly cling, believing in our moment of hunger that there is no other possibility of love, we only have to let go of what we want so badly and our life will unfold. For love is everywhere.

Mark Nepo

#90. The humanitarian Carol Hegedus reminds us, Our purpose is that which we most passionately are when we pay attention to our deepest selves.

Mark Nepo

#91. No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts.

Mark Nepo

#92. Now, I want only to give away all that I'm blessed to know and disappear in the stream.

Mark Nepo

#93. Robert calmly, like an Oriental sage himself, treated the situation as if it were a koan, a riddle to be entered until its very assumptions shifted.

Mark Nepo

#94. Each of us carries some wisdom waiting to be discovered at the center of our experience. Everything we meet, if faced and held, reveals a part of that wisdom.

Mark Nepo

#95. As nature erodes the earth into magnificent forms, life through endless experience opens us further and further to the essence of what matters. Each time I've been opened further, the way I experience life and receive things has changed.

Mark Nepo

#96. One of the most challenging ways is to slow down enough to relax our heart and feel what is nearest. It could be the sun reflecting off of broken glass in an alley. It could be the shine on a crow. It could be snow on a lamp post.

Mark Nepo

#97. When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.

Mark Nepo

#98. For being human, we remember and forget. We stray and return, fall down and get up, and cling and let go, again and again. But it is this straying and returning that makes life interesting, this clinging and letting go - damned as it is - that exercises the heart.

Mark Nepo

#99. There is a great choice that awaits us every day: whether we go around carving holes in others because we have been so painfully carved ourselves, or whether we let spirit play its song through our tender experience, enabling us to listen, as well, to the miraculous music coming through others.

Mark Nepo

#100. We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.

Mark Nepo