Mark Nepo Quotes

Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.

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

Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we've spun, the tasks we've assumed, the problems we have to solve. They'll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.

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

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

When the sweet ache of being alive, lodged between who you are and who you will be, is awakened, befriend this moment. It will guide you. Its sweetness is what holds you. Its ache is what moves you on.

Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.

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.

Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color.... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I have found that life is alive and we are requested to have a friendship with it, to have a conversation with life and that conversation is restorative and healing and always nearby.

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

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.

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

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.

…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)

I would rather be fooled than not believe.

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.

The world needs awakened souls the way a body needs healthy cells.

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.

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.

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

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 journeying is to be a pilgrim.

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

What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.

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

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

Have the #‎ life you want by being fully present to the life you have.

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

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

To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

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

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

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

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.

It is the courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur. And it is by honoring how life comes through us that we get the most out of living, not by keeping ourselves out of the way. The goal is to mix our hands in the earth, not to stay clean.

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

Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.