Mark Nepo Quotes - Page 6

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.

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

Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.

We're quietly aching for something to celebrate

If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.

Listening reminds me how precious it is to be here at all. And so, listening is the first step to peace, both inner peace and the compassion that connects people.

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.

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

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.

The point of experience is not to escape life but to live it.

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.

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

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

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.

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

What we reach for may be different, but what makes us reach is the same.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I would rather be fooled than not believe.

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

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

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