Best Mark Nepo Quotes

#1. There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.

Mark Nepo

#2. 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

#3. The things that can restore us have to get in, too. This is what the wisdom of an open heart is all about. All the spiritual traditions speak of this but I love the Tibetan tradition: "A spiritual warrior always has a crack in his heart because that is how the mysteries can get in."

Mark Nepo

#4. 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

#5. Love and grief enable us to feel how we're all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.

Mark Nepo

#6. We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given.

Mark Nepo

#7. And where is home? Is it where we begin or where we end up? Is it where we long to be or where life puts us to make good use of our gifts?

Mark Nepo

#8. 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

#9. Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.

Mark Nepo

#10. 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

#11. Whatever is held and listened to will show us where it lives in the world and in us.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#14. 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

#15. In loving ourselves, we love the world.

Mark Nepo

#16. When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul's energy; as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#18. Everything in life opens and closes, sheds and renews. We are no different. Listening in its endless forms is the way we stay open, the way we stay in relationship, the way we refresh who we are and what we're doing here.

Mark Nepo

#19. 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

#20. We tend to make the thing in the way the way.

Mark Nepo

#21. Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are

Mark Nepo

#22. To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.

Mark Nepo

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#27. 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

#28. If you had a sad childhood, so what? You can dance with only one leg and see the snowflake falling with only one eye. - ROBERT BLY

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo