Mark Nepo Quotes

The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.

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

The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.

Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.

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.

We're quietly aching for something to celebrate

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.

Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.

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.

Keeping a commitment to listening has led me to my own growth, beyond any imagined dreams I may have had throughout the years.

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.

I don't personally believe in an arrived state of enlightenment. I feel that being human is a constant practice of return. We have moments of clarity, and then we're confused. We have incredibly sensitive periods of being awake, and then we're numb. Being human is a very universal and a very personal practice of learning how to return when we can't get access to what we know.

Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.

When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.

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

But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.

I would want to affirm how rare and magnificent and messy it is to be alive, how there is really nothing between us and life, though so many things get in the way, and how our heart is the strongest muscle and resource we have.

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

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

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.

The broken door lets in the light. The broken heart lets in the world.

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

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

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

Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.

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

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

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

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

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

Walk long enough and we all trade places.

Whatever difficulty you face, there are time-tried ways you can listen your way through. Because listening is the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive.

Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.

I've learned that loving your self requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world - our own self worth.

Just opening quietly for moments everyday can create a path by which life can reach us, the way rain carves a little stream in the earth by which the smallest flowers are watered.

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

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

The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.

It has always amazed and humbled me to how the risk to bloom can seem so insurmountable beforehand and so inevitably freeing once the threshold of suffering is crossed.

My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.

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.

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.