Top 180 Mark Nepo Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Having an honest friend-one before whom you can dump all your heart’s pockets and still feel that you are worth something-is a form of wealth that will buy you nothing but will give you everything. And mysteriously and rightly, to find such a friend, we must be such a friend.”

— Mark Nepo

103. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

104. “Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.”

— Mark Nepo

105. “These bodies are perishable, but the Dweller in these bodies is eternal. – BHAGAVAD-GITA.”

— Mark Nepo

106. “Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.”

— Mark Nepo

107. “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

108. “The humility of wonder opens everything.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

110. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

111. “Yet beneath all the talk of tragedy and grace, I have come to believe that we are destined to be opened by the living of our days, and whether we like it or not, whether we choose to participate or not, we will, in time, every one of us, wear the deeper part of who we are as a new skin.”

— Mark Nepo

112. “So what does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? It is far from being a soldier, but more the sincerity with which a soul faces itself in a daily way. It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur. And it is by honoring how life comes through us that we get the most out of living, not by keeping ourselves out of the way. The goal is to mix our hands in the earth, not to stay clean.”

— Mark Nepo

113. “But today you are precious and rare and awake. It ushers us into grateful living. It makes hesitation useless. Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.”

— Mark Nepo

114. “The gift of patience opens when our body, heart, and mind slow enough to move in unison.”

— Mark Nepo

115. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

116. “Help me resist the urge to dispute whether things are true or false which is like arguing whether it is day or night. It is always one or the other somewhere in the world. Together, we can penetrate a higher truth which like the sun is always being conveyed.”

— Mark Nepo

117. “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows. – NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

119. “The many ways to listen have been reaching into me for years. To enter deep listening, I’ve had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning. I’ve had to lean into all I don’t understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear.”

— Mark Nepo

120. “Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.”

— Mark Nepo

121. “For though we stubbornly cling, believing in our moment of hunger that there is no other possibility of love, we only have to let go of what we want so badly and our life will unfold. For love is everywhere.”

— Mark Nepo

122. “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

123. “Memories are not images of loved ones returning to us. They are the spirits of loved ones visiting us.”

— Mark Nepo

124. “The truth is that life will break us and burn us at some point on the journey. This is not pessimistic or cynical but descriptive of the geography of being alive. It is part of how we are transformed by the journey. Yet when we’re broken or burned by events, we feel betrayed by God. When we’re broken or burned by people, we feel betrayed by other souls.”

— Mark Nepo

125. “Just opening quietly for moments everyday can create a path by which life can reach us, the way rain carves a little stream in the earth by which the smallest flowers are watered.”

— Mark Nepo

126. “I had tried so hard to please that I never realized no one was watching.”

— Mark Nepo

127. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

129. “Meditation, in all its forms and traditions, is an invitation to listen, to open, to quietly enlist the courage to be touched and formed by life.”

— Mark Nepo

130. “Since speed and confidence are the traits of success we are taught to strive with, it takes added courage to welcome time and humility into our lives.”

— Mark Nepo

131. “We tend to make the thing in the way the way.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

133. “But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.”

— Mark Nepo

134. “Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.”

— Mark Nepo

135. “What it really comes down to is the clearness of heart to stop defining who I am by those who have hurt me and to take up the risk to love myself, to validate my own existence, pain and all, from the center out.”

— Mark Nepo

136. “If you had a sad childhood, so what? You can dance with only one leg and see the snowflake falling with only one eye. – ROBERT BLY.”

— Mark Nepo

137. “When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.”

— Mark Nepo

138. “We’re quietly aching for something to celebrate.”

— Mark Nepo

139. “For only when we can outwait the dark will the sharpness of experience recede like a tide to reveal what has survived beneath it all. Often what seems tragic, if looked at long enough, reveals itself as part of a larger transformation.”

— Mark Nepo

140. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

141. “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

142. “The eye can see what we have in common or focus on what keeps us apart. And the heart can feel what joins us with everything or replay its many cuts. And the tongue can praise the wind or warn against the storm, can praise the sea or dread the flood.”

— Mark Nepo

143. “Just as a vine or shrub – no matter how often it is cut back – will keep growing to the light, the human heart – no matter how often it is cut – can reassert its impulse to love.”

— Mark Nepo

144. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

145. “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”

— Mark Nepo

146. “Living is a conversation with no end, a dance with no steps, a song with no words, a reason too big for any mind.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

148. “When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

150. “When we need it most, it is nearly impossible to see ourselves with compassion from the slit of a narrowed mind all tensed for battle.”

— Mark Nepo