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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.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Way
Teach
Make
Help
Humbly
Good
Write
Wanting
Life
Helping
Discovered
Change
Meaningful
Persons
Hopefully
Person
Changing
Writing
Driven

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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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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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To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
Mark Nepo
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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
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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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A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it
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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Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
Mark Nepo
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The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
Mark Nepo
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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.
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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I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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We need experience to release what matters.
Mark Nepo
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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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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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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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.
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