Quote

…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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Teacher
Looking
Water
Learn
Birds
Keep
Fish
Find
Fishes
Sky
Bird

More quotes by Mark Nepo

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.
Mark Nepo
Image
I would rather be fooled than not believe.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
Mark Nepo
Image
Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
Walk long enough and we all trade places.
Mark Nepo