Mark Nepo Quotes

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

Mark Nepo

#2. 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

#3. Even if one glimpses God, there are cuts and splinters and burns along the way.

Mark Nepo

#4. Living is the original art. As a young man I wanted to be a poet and I learned along the way that I already was a poet.

Mark Nepo

#5. The real & lasting practice for each of us is to remove what obstructs us so we can be who we are ...

Mark Nepo

#6. 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

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

Mark Nepo

#8. Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. - SENG-TS'AN

Mark Nepo

#9. 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

#10. As Martin Luther King Jr. prophesied, "I believe what the self-centered have torn down, the other-centered will build up.

Mark Nepo

#11. The only response to adversity or misunderstanding is to be more completely who we are - to share ourselves more.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#13. 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

#14. Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.

Mark Nepo

#15. In life as in water, when we curl up or flail we sink. When we spread and go still, we are carried by the largest sea of all: the sea of grace that flows steadily beneath the turmoil of events. And just as fish can't see the ocean they live in, we can't quite see the spirit that sustains us.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#17. We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance and effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way.

Mark Nepo

#18. Grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#20. 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

#21. My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.

Mark Nepo

#22. To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.

Mark Nepo

#23. We are broken open, or we willfully shed.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#29. 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

#30. The work of prayer, when we feel least like praying, is neither to inflate or deflate the world or ourselves, but to restore our connection to the powerful currents of life.

Mark Nepo

#31. So, if you can, give up the want of another and be who you are, and more often than not, love will come at the precise moment you are simply loving yourself.

Mark Nepo

#32. I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. By our very nature, we are a human paradox. We are a human being. The being is infinite and the human is very finite. We walk around like lightening in a bottle.

Mark Nepo

#38. We are the stage and all the players.

Mark Nepo

#39. What we reach for may be different, but what makes us reach is the same.

Mark Nepo

#40. 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

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

Mark Nepo

#42. Try as we do to resist what we're given, this is the only doorway to truth. We waste too much time and energy denying or fighting where we find ourselves.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#44. In the same way that we have to clean wax from our ears and dirt from our eyes, we're all asked to clean out our conclusions and judgments, which block our heart from meeting the world.

Mark Nepo

#45. The practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous, and challenging art forms on Earth.

Mark Nepo

#46. When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own.

Mark Nepo

#47. We are born with only one obligation - to be completely who we are.

Mark Nepo

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Often we find it easier to think our way around things rather than to feel our way through them:

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#52. 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

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

Mark Nepo

#54. 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

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#58. 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

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

Mark Nepo

#60. 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

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

Mark Nepo

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

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

Mark Nepo

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#71. 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

#72. 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

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#78. 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

#79. I didn't know the language of my own wisdom. I wanted to be loved and after all the various relationships I went through, I finally realized I am love. I carry love.

Mark Nepo

#80. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to ... open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away.

Mark Nepo

#81. Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#83. Tragedy stays alive by feeling what's been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results.

Mark Nepo

#84. We are so achievement-oriented that we often surge right by the true value of relating to what's before us, because we think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#86. The point of experience is not to escape life but to live it.

Mark Nepo

#87. Whatever our path, whatever the color or grain of our days, whatever riddles we must solve to stay alive, the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep.

Mark Nepo

#88. 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

#89. 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

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

Mark Nepo

#91. 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

#92. Joy in what we do is not an added feature; it is a sign of deep health.

Mark Nepo

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

Mark Nepo

#94. Now I want to stand naked before every wind; and though I'm still frightened I will break, I somehow know it's all a part - even the fright - of the rhythm of being alive.

Mark Nepo

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

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

Mark Nepo