110+ Mark Nepo Quotes On Friendship, Inspirational And Reflective

Mark Nepo is an American poet and philosopher. He is best known for his book The Book of Awakening, which was a New York Times bestseller for over a year. He has authored many other books, including The Exquisite Risk, The Endless Practice, and Inside the Miracle. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Mark Nepo on love, friendship, inspirational.

Top 10 Mark Nepo Quotes

1. The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.
2. The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
3. When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
4. 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.
5. To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
6. All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
7. Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
8. …there are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.
9. The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
10. Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are

Mark Nepo Short Quotes

• Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
• 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.
• 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.
• The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
• The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
• Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
• Let the miracles, even the ones we don't want or see, unfold.
• The humility of wonder opens everything.

Mark Nepo Quotes About Love

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

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

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

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

Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery. — Mark Nepo

To love by admitting our connection to everything is how we stay well. — Mark Nepo

We travel so far only to land where we are. We imagine other lives, only to meet who we are. We seek out love in special ways, only to find everyone is special. Humbly, we can't avoid this journey. — Mark Nepo

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

No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts. — Mark Nepo

My friends are the beings through whom God loves me. — Mark Nepo

Mark Nepo Famous Quotes And Sayings

There are many ways that we grow, but there are two major ways: We shed what no longer works, or we're broken open. If we're unwilling to shed, then we will be broken open. Through shedding, we are worn down, just as nature is eroded to its beauty. I think that through suffering, human beings are eroded to our beauty. — Mark Nepo

What will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands? Tomorrow you could die, but today you are precious and rare and awake. Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now. — Mark Nepo

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

Through the opened heart, the world comes rushing in, the way oceans fill the smallest hole along the shore. It is the quietest sort of miracle: by simply being who we are, the world will come to fill us, to cleanse us, to baptize us, again and again. — Mark Nepo

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

My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so. — Mark Nepo

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

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

The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments. — Mark Nepo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would want to affirm how rare and magnificent and messy it is to be alive, how there is really nothing between us and life, though so many things get in the way, and how our heart is the strongest muscle and resource we have. — Mark Nepo

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

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

Try as we do to resist what we're given, this is the only doorway to truth. We waste too much time and energy denying or fighting where we find ourselves. — Mark Nepo

For listening to the stories of others ... is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name. — Mark Nepo

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

there is a great choice that awaits us every day: whether we go around carving holes in others because we have been so painfully carved ourselves, or whether we let spirit play its song through our tender experience, enabling us to listen, as well, to the miraculous music coming through others. — Mark Nepo

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

In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame. — Mark Nepo

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

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

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

A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it — Mark Nepo

In truth, our aliveness depends on our ability to sustain wonder: to lengthen the moments we are truly uncovered, to be still and quiet till all the elements of the earth and all the secrets of the oceans stir the aspects of life waiting within us. — Mark Nepo

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

The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of thingsstop being a glass. Become a lake. — Mark Nepo

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

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

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

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

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. — Mark Nepo

Have the #‎ life you want by being fully present to the life you have. — Mark Nepo

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

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

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. — Mark Nepo

When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it. — Mark Nepo

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

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

At the heart of each spiritual tradition is the question of how to be in the world without losing what matters, and whether living an awakened life is of any use if we don't bring what matters to bear on the world. — Mark Nepo

Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens. — Mark Nepo

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

I was raised Jewish by atheistic-agnostic parents. During this journey, I had people from all walks and all faiths try to help. A Jewish priest who I was friends with wanted to lay hands on me - I didn't ask questions about how - I just said when and where and how often do you want to do it? I didn't argue. — Mark Nepo

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

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

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

Walk long enough and we all trade places. — Mark Nepo

We are broken open, or we willfully shed. — Mark Nepo

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

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

When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back. — Mark Nepo

In a world that lives like a fist mercy is not more than waking with your hands open. — Mark Nepo

Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace. — Mark Nepo

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

The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas. — Mark Nepo

The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it. — Mark Nepo

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

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

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

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

We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given. — Mark Nepo

We're quietly aching for something to celebrate — Mark Nepo

Even if one glimpses God, there are cuts and splinters and burns along the way. — Mark Nepo

I don't personally believe in an arrived state of enlightenment. I feel that being human is a constant practice of return. We have moments of clarity, and then we're confused. We have incredibly sensitive periods of being awake, and then we're numb. Being human is a very universal and a very personal practice of learning how to return when we can't get access to what we know. — Mark Nepo

It is the 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

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

We need to give up what no longer works and find new ways of being that keeps us close to what matters. — Mark Nepo

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

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

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

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

Truth is a seed hidden in the days until watered by what life brings us. — Mark Nepo

Each soul on earth is complete unto itself. — Mark Nepo

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

The broken door lets in the light. The broken heart lets in the world. — Mark Nepo

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

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

We need experience to release what matters. — Mark Nepo

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Mark Nepo

1. Mark Nepo emphasizes the importance of being present and living in the moment, rather than worrying about the future or dwelling on the past.
2. He encourages us to be open to life's surprises and to embrace the joy and pain of the human experience.
3. Through his poetry, Nepo reminds us to be mindful of our connection to the world around us and to appreciate the beauty of life.