Mark Nepo Quotes

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

The humility of wonder opens everything.

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

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.

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

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.

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

A love astounds us or a pain consumes us and we forget that we glow on our own.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.

We are broken open, or we willfully shed.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I didn't know the language of my own wisdom. I wanted to be loved and after all the various relationships I went through, I finally realized I am love. I carry love.

No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts.

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

We travel so far only to land where we are. We imagine other lives, only to meet who we are. We seek out love in special ways, only to find everyone is special. Humbly, we can't avoid this journey.

I have found that life is alive and we are requested to have a friendship with it, to have a conversation with life and that conversation is restorative and healing and always nearby.

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.

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.

No amount of thinking can stop thinking.

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

What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.

To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource.

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.

The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again.

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.

My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was a very driven person, wanting to help and to do good, hopefully to write and teach in a meaningful way - wanting to make change. And I discovered humbly that life was changing me.

The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.