Mark Nepo Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

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

Mark Nepo
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.

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

Mark Nepo
There is no getting around the fundamental fact that we need to interact with everything in order to manifest the wholeness we are born with.

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

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

Mark Nepo
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.

Mark Nepo
The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.

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

Mark Nepo
The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.

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

Mark Nepo
We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.

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

Mark Nepo
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.

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

Mark Nepo
Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak.

Mark Nepo