Top 180 Mark Nepo Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.”

— Mark Nepo

2. “The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.”

— Mark Nepo

3. “All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

6. “Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind.”

— Mark Nepo

7. “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

8. “When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.”

— Mark Nepo

9. “As the seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way.”

— Mark Nepo

10. “The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.”

— Mark Nepo

11. “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

12. “If I dare to hear you I will feel you like the sun And grow in your direction.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

14. “When we heal ourselves, we heal the world. For as the body is only as healthy as its individual cells, the world is only as healthy as its individual souls.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

16. “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

17. “Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.”

— Mark Nepo

18. “The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.”

— Mark Nepo

19. “No amount of thinking can stop thinking.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

21. “Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.”

— Mark Nepo

22. “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

23. “The sun doesn’t stop shining because some people are blind.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

25. “Walk long enough and we all trade places.”

— Mark Nepo

26. “Breathe like a fallen leaf and think of nothing. Just breathe and let your heart and mind be carried, however briefly, by the spirit you can’t quite see.”

— Mark Nepo

27. “Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are.”

— Mark Nepo

28. “The things that can restore us have to get in, too. This is what the wisdom of an open heart is all about. All the spiritual traditions speak of this but I love the Tibetan tradition: “A spiritual warrior always has a crack in his heart because that is how the mysteries can get in.””

— Mark Nepo

29. “Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.”

— Mark Nepo

30. “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

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

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

33. “When the sweet ache of being alive, lodged between who you are and who you will be, is awakened, befriend this moment. It will guide you. Its sweetness is what holds you. Its ache is what moves you on.”

— Mark Nepo

34. “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

35. “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

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

— Mark Nepo

37. “The courage to hear and embody opens us to a startling secret, that the best chance to be whole is to love whatever gets in the way, until it ceases to be an obstacle.”

— Mark Nepo

38. “Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.”

— Mark Nepo

39. “To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.”

— Mark Nepo

40. “We often mistake the journey of healing as one that covers over a wound. But as wounds need air and light to knit and heal, our pain and sorrow need to be brought out into the open so we can be healed by life.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

43. “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

44. “Tragedy stays alive by feeling what’s been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results.”

— Mark Nepo

45. “Accepting what we’re given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.”

— Mark Nepo

46. “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

47. “To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.”

— Mark Nepo

48. “We think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.”

— Mark Nepo

49. “We are so unused to emotion that we mistake any depth of feeling for sadness, any sense of the unknown for fear, and any sense of peace for boredom.”

— Mark Nepo

50. “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.”

— Mark Nepo