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Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Human
Humans
Discover
Must
Challenge
Blessing
Challenges
True
Nature
Part

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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.
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Truth is a seed hidden in the days until watered by what life brings us.
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Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.
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I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.
Mark Nepo
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Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
Mark Nepo
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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
Mark Nepo
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
Mark Nepo
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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
Mark Nepo
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…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
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The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.
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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
Mark Nepo