Mark Nepo Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Mark Nepo
My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so.

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Nepo
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
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
The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas.

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

Mark Nepo
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
We think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.

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

Mark Nepo
Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.

Mark Nepo
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.

Mark Nepo
What will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands?... Tomorrow you could die... but today you are precious and rare and awake... Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.

Mark Nepo
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.

Mark Nepo
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
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