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
Beautiful
Devote
Hands
Reveals
Seems
Advertising
Anything
Follow
Live
Rest
Matter
Willing
Life
Hand
Else

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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To listen also means to stay in relationship, the central challenge of our time, and this requires us to constantly minimize whatever stands between us and life.
Mark Nepo
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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
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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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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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
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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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.
Mark Nepo
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The real & lasting practice for each of us is to remove what obstructs us so we can be who we are.
Mark Nepo
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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
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Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
Mark Nepo
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Joy in what we do is not an added feature it is a sign of deep health.
Mark Nepo
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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
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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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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
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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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Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
Mark Nepo
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Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone.
Mark Nepo