Quote

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

Mark Nepo

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Hear
Softly
Lean
Willingness
Listen
Changed

More quotes by Mark Nepo

Image
Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
Mark Nepo
Image
What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
Mark Nepo
Image
When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
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
Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak.
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
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
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
A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it
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
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
Image
Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
Mark Nepo
Image
The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
Mark Nepo
Image
Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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