Quote

We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.

Mark Nepo

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Facts
Another
Persons
Person
Everything
Anticipate
Way
Prepared
Never
Wall
Life
Fact

More quotes by Mark Nepo

Image
If we devote ourselves to the life at hand, the rest will follow. For life, it seems, reveals itself through those willing to live. Anything else, no matter how beautiful, is just advertising.
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
Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
Mark Nepo
Image
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
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
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
Image
When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
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
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
Image
The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.
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
If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
Mark Nepo
Image
To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
Mark Nepo
Image
Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
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
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
What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
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