Mark Nepo famous quotes

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

#Who We Are #Born #Obligation

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.
-- Mark Nepo

#Confused #Believe #Practice

The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
-- Mark Nepo

#Knowing #Keys #Joy

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

#Thinking #Keys #Joy

When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
-- Mark Nepo

#World #Heal #Heal The World

We need to meet, embrace and work with what we're given. For what we want and what we're given often serve two different gods. And how we respond to their meeting determines our path.
-- Mark Nepo

#Two #Needs #Want

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

#Teacher #Sky #Water

When we don't get what we want, there's a legitimate grieving, and then the spiritual journey truly begins, because not getting what we want breaks our self-reference; and once that is broken, we are aware that we are a part of a larger whole. It changes everything.
-- Mark Nepo

#Spiritual #Journey #Grieving

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

#Expression #Tuning #Sacred

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

#Real #Emotional #Challenges

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

#Change #Giving Up #Mean

There are many ways that we grow, but there are two major ways: We shed what no longer works, or we're broken open. If we're unwilling to shed, then we will be broken open. Through shedding, we are worn down, just as nature is eroded to its beauty. I think that through suffering, human beings are eroded to our beauty.
-- Mark Nepo

#Thinking #Two #Broken

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

#Blessing #Challenges #Being Human

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.
-- Mark Nepo

#Heart #Space #Mind

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.
-- Mark Nepo

#Dream #Effort #Waiting

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

#Stars #Reality #Animal

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

#Writing #Miracle #Speak

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.
-- Mark Nepo

#Light #Broken #Water

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

#Soulmate #Listening #Sun

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

#Want

To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
-- Mark Nepo

#Changed #Willingness

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

#Listening #Mind #Stills

Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.
-- Mark Nepo

#Mean #Air #Mouths

Even if one glimpses God, there are cuts and splinters and burns along the way.
-- Mark Nepo

#Cutting #Splinters #Way

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Healthy

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

#Dream #Flower #Bees

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

#Grateful #Hands #Knowing

It seems that the ancient Medicine Men understood that listening to another's story somehow gives us the strength of example to carry on, as well as showing us aspects of ourselves we can't easily see. For listening to the stories of others - not to their precautions or personal commandments - 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.
-- Mark Nepo

#Men #Names #Medicine

…there are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.
-- Mark Nepo

#Path #Unexpected #Turns

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
-- Mark Nepo

#Real #Eye #Heart

Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
-- Mark Nepo

#Light #Broken #Bottles

there is a great choice that awaits us every day: whether we go around carving holes in others because we have been so painfully carved ourselves, or whether we let spirit play its song through our tender experience, enabling us to listen, as well, to the miraculous music coming through others.
-- Mark Nepo

#Song #Play #Choices

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Suicide

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

#Energy #Sorting

To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.
-- Mark Nepo

#Broken #Reason

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

#Heaven #Earth #Release

Walk long enough and we all trade places.
-- Mark Nepo

#Long #Enough #Trade

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

#Beautiful #Hands #Matter

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

#Knowing #Bird #Flight

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

#Listening #Way #Worn

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

#Practice #Needs #Accepting

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.
-- Mark Nepo

#Names #Water #Listening

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.
-- Mark Nepo

#Risk #Suffering #Threshold

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

#Heart #Effort #Soul

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

#Meetings #Humans

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

#Joy

We are broken open, or we willfully shed.
-- Mark Nepo

#Broken #Shed

We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
-- Mark Nepo

#Way

Before we can count we are taught to be grateful for what others do. As we are broken open by our experience, we begin to be grateful for what is, and if we live long enough and deep enough and authentically enough, gratitude becomes a way of life.
-- Mark Nepo

#Gratitude #Grateful #Long

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

#Hands #Fists #Waking

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

#Clouds #Light #Sun

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

#Struggle #Order

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

#Long #Matter #Way

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

#Thinking #Compassion #Blue

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.
-- Mark Nepo

#Ocean #Heart #Rushing

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

#Connections #Admitting #Wells

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

#Grief #Loss #Grieving

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

#Different #Looks #World

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

#Dust #Air #Gold

Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
-- Mark Nepo

#Important

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

#Waiting #Skins #Ordinary

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

#Successful #Expression #Creative

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

#Dark #Cracks #Surrender

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

#Different #May

It is imperative that we find that vital element that brings us alive... the true vitality that waits beneath all occupations for us to tap into, if we can discover what we love. If you feel energy and excitement and a sense that life is happening for the first time, you are probably near your God-given nature. Joy in what we do is not an added feature; it is a sign of deep health.
-- Mark Nepo

#Joy #Waiting #Elements