Quote

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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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Time
Listen
Life
Stay
Relationship
Minimize
Challenges
Central
Whatever
Stands
Means
Requires
Also
Constantly
Mean
Challenge

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.
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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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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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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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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.
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I would rather be fooled than not believe.
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We travel so far only to land where we are. We imagine other lives, only to meet who we are. We seek out love in special ways, only to find everyone is special. Humbly, we can't avoid this journey.
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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.
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No amount of thinking can stop thinking.
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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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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
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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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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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Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
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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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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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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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If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.
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