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The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Become
Minds
Assumption
Storehouse
Heart
Judgment
Fill
Harden
Kind
Build
Conclusion
Insights
Mind
Capacity
Insight
Assumptions
Personal
Gain
Judgments
Knowledge
Gains
Conclusions
Space
Amazing
Spaces
Learn
Hearts
Paradox
Underside

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
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All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
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Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak.
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When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
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The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.
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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
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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.
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When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.
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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.
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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.
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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
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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.
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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.
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When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.
Mark Nepo