Mark Nepo Quotes

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.

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

The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.

When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.

The real & lasting practice for each of us is to remove what obstructs us so we can be who we are.

To journey without being changed, is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journeying is to be a pilgrim.

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

…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)

Each of us carries some wisdom waiting to be discovered at the center of our experience. Everything we meet, if faced and held, reveals a part of that wisdom.

…there are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.

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

All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.

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

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

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

Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.

Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are

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

The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.

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

We are born with only one obligation - to be completely who we are.

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.

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

Who's to say the effort to be real isn't the beginning of wings?

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.

Walk long enough and we all trade places.

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

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

Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to ... open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away.

Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.

The world needs awakened souls the way a body needs healthy cells.

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

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

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

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.

Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.

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

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

Pursue the obstacle It will set you free

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.

Let the miracles, even the ones we don't want or see, unfold.

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.

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

The broken door lets in the light. The broken heart lets in the world.

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

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

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

We tend to make the thing in the way the way.

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.