Mark Nepo Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Mark Nepo
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
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.

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

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

Mark Nepo
We are born with only one obligation - to be completely who we are.

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

Mark Nepo
In a world that lives like a fist mercy is not more than waking with your hands open.

Mark Nepo
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.

Mark Nepo
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.

Mark Nepo
I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.

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

Mark Nepo
The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of thingsstop being a glass. Become a lake.

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

Mark Nepo
When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.

Mark Nepo
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.

Mark Nepo
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.

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

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

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

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

Mark Nepo
Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are

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

Mark Nepo