Quote

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

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Life
Hand
Else
Beautiful
Devote
Hands
Reveals
Seems
Advertising
Anything
Follow
Live
Rest
Matter
Willing

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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.
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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.
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When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.
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Joy in what we do is not an added feature it is a sign of deep health.
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The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
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The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.
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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.
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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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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given.
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My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so.
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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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
Mark Nepo
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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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