Mark Nepo Quotes

I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.

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

I would rather be fooled than not believe.

We're quietly aching for something to celebrate

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

Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.

Living is the original art. As a young man I wanted to be a poet and I learned along the way that I already was a poet.

Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.

We need experience to release what matters.

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.

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

The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.

I had over twenty years ago damaged the cilia in my ears. This has taught me many things. One thing I learned, paradoxically, is that there is much to be heard in silence.

To listen also means to stay in relationship, the central challenge of our time, and this requires us to constantly minimize whatever stands between us and life.

By our very nature, we are a human paradox. We are a human being. The being is infinite and the human is very finite. We walk around like lightening in a bottle.

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.

The point of experience is not to escape life but to live it.

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.

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

When wiggling through a holethe world looks different thanwhen scrubbed clean by the wiggleand looking back.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real.

Once waking into the realization that eternity is waiting in every moment, I discovered that wealth is time, not money.

I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.

The reward for being sensitive is that we’re held by the Universe, the way the ocean in its buoyancy holds up a raft.

Can we listen to each other the way veins listen to blood?