Top 180 Mark Nepo Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “The Pain of Becoming For the flower, it is fully open at each step of its blossoming. We do ourselves a great disservice by judging where we are in comparison to some final destination. This is one of the pains of aspiring to become something: the stage of development we are in is always seen against the imagined landscape of what we are striving for. So where we are – though closer all the time – is never quite enough.”

— Mark Nepo

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.”

— Mark Nepo

56. “One of the most challenging ways is to slow down enough to relax our heart and feel what is nearest. It could be the sun reflecting off of broken glass in an alley. It could be the shine on a crow. It could be snow on a lamp post.”

— Mark Nepo

57. “My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.”

— Mark Nepo

58. “I’ve learned that loving your self requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world – our own self worth.”

— Mark Nepo

59. “We are born with only one obligation – to be completely who we are.”

— Mark Nepo

60. “I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

62. “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

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

— Mark Nepo

64. “Whatever difficulty you face, there are time-tried ways you can listen your way through. Because listening is the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive.”

— Mark Nepo

65. “We are broken open, or we willfully shed.”

— Mark Nepo

66. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

67. “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

68. “Kindness is the antidote to everything. Just as water soothes fire, kindness calms how we burn each other from time to time. And under all the ways we burn and hurt, there’s the soft and lasting presence we were born with, waiting to blossom in the midst of any trouble.”

— Mark Nepo

69. “Our crucial task when in pain or despair is not to let the sour feelings spill into everything, so that we stain our sense of the world. Yet we must also take care not to so contain our feelings that they fester and infect our sense of ourselves. Somewhere between these two extremes waits the life of healthy expression, not personalizing everything and not painting the world with our troubles.”

— Mark Nepo

70. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

71. “Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.”

— Mark Nepo

72. “If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective.”

— Mark Nepo

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Mark Nepo

76. “Everything in life opens and closes, sheds and renews. We are no different. Listening in its endless forms is the way we stay open, the way we stay in relationship, the way we refresh who we are and what we’re doing here.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

78. “Who’s to say the effort to be real isn’t the beginning of wings?”

— Mark Nepo

79. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

80. “Being human, we are constantly broken apart by experience. To reconcile our humanness means we are ever learning how to accept our suffering and to restore our Wholeness.”

— Mark Nepo

81. “I laugh when I think of how many hours I have spent in my life weaving storylines that never came true until, like weeds, they covered my heart.”

— Mark Nepo

82. “Whatever our path, whatever the color or grain of our days, whatever riddles we must solve to stay alive, the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep.”

— Mark Nepo

83. “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

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

— Mark Nepo

85. “Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.”

— Mark Nepo

86. “Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.”

— Mark Nepo

87. “I would rather be fooled than not believe.”

— Mark Nepo

88. “The broken door lets in the light. The broken heart lets in the world.”

— Mark Nepo

89. “The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.”

— Mark Nepo

90. “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

91. “The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.”

— Mark Nepo

92. “When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul’s energy; as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.”

— Mark Nepo

93. “As nature erodes the earth into magnificent forms, life through endless experience opens us further and further to the essence of what matters. Each time I’ve been opened further, the way I experience life and receive things has changed.”

— Mark Nepo

94. “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

95. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

97. “Where love is deep much can be accomplished. – SHINICHI SUZUKI.”

— Mark Nepo

98. “What is most healing about bearing witness to things exactly as they are, including my own part in my pain, is that when the voice of the pain fits the pain, there is no room for distortion or illusion. In this way, truth becomes a clean bandage that heals, keeping dirt out of the wound. To voice things as they are is the nearest medicine.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

100. “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.”

— Mark Nepo