Top 180 Mark Nepo Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live.”

— Mark Nepo

153. “In the same way that we have to clean wax from our ears and dirt from our eyes, we’re all asked to clean out our conclusions and judgments, which block our heart from meeting the world.”

— Mark Nepo

154. “In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible. – BUDDHA.”

— Mark Nepo

155. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

157. “Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.”

— Mark Nepo

158. “Because we must meet the outer world with our inner world or existence will crush us. It is a spiritual law, as real as gravity. If we don’t assume our space as living beings, the rest of life will fill us completely the way water fills a hole.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

160. “What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

163. “Is it possible that, with each inhalation, we take in the world and awaken our soul? And with each exhalation, do we free ourselves of the world, which inevitably entangles us? Is this how we fill up and empty a hundred times a day, always seeking the gift of the two breaths? Perhaps this is the work of being.”

— Mark Nepo

164. “Likewise, every disturbance, whether resolved or not, is making space for an inner engagement. As a shovel digs up and displaces earth, in a way that must seem violent to the earth, an interior space is revealed for the digging. In just this way, when experience opens us, it often feels violent and the urge, quite naturally, is to refill that opening, to make it the way it was. But every experience excavates a depth, which reveals its wisdom once opened to air.”

— Mark Nepo

165. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

166. “Can we listen to each other the way veins listen to blood?”

— Mark Nepo

167. “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.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

169. “So, if you can, give up the want of another and be who you are, and more often than not, love will come at the precise moment you are simply loving yourself.”

— Mark Nepo

170. “Now, I want only to give away all that I’m blessed to know and disappear in the stream.”

— Mark Nepo

171. “Whatever is held and listened to will show us where it lives in the world and in us.”

— Mark Nepo

172. “We are the stage and all the players.”

— Mark Nepo

173. “When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own.”

— Mark Nepo

174. “Let the miracles, even the ones we don’t want or see, unfold.”

— Mark Nepo

175. “I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.”

— Mark Nepo

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

— Mark Nepo

177. “The wildflower’s reward for trusting what it senses but doesn’t yet know is to become what is was born to be – a flower whose inevitable place is realized in a small moment of Oneness, as it joins with elements that were here before it came alive and which will live on once it dies.”

— Mark Nepo

178. “And kindness is enlivened and released through the risk of immediate care. It is the practice of allowing compassion to guide us, the practice of uncovering our intimacy with all things. Together, meaning, truth, and kindness connect everything, forming a lifeline we can hold on to, no matter the storm.”

— Mark Nepo

179. “In loving ourselves, we love the world.”

— Mark Nepo

180. “It’s such a simple thing, but in a moment of ego we refuse to put down what we carry in order to open the door. Time and time again, we are offered the chance to truly learn this: We cannot hold on to things and enter. We must put down what we carry, open the door, and then take up only what we need to bring inside.”

— Mark Nepo

181. “So in your days, when feeling narrow and needing to broaden, when feeling less and needing to deepen, put down what seems certain and reach for what seems clear. Know you are a sun rising and falling along a tenuous horizon, like all the suns before you, strung between forces that both enlarge and shrink your sense of life. It is a beautifully difficult set of tensions that only those blessed to be alive can experience. Like hot notes on timeless strings, we are music fingered by the gods.”

— Mark Nepo