Quotes from Mark Nepo

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.

Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are

Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.

Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.

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.

Tragedy stays alive by feeling what's been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results.

Even if one glimpses God, there are cuts and splinters and burns along the way.

The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.

Joy in what we do is not an added feature; it is a sign of deep health.

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.

We think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.

Just opening quietly for moments everyday can create a path by which life can reach us, the way rain carves a little stream in the earth by which the smallest flowers are watered.

The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.

Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.

Meditation, in all its forms and traditions, is an invitation to listen, to open, to quietly enlist the courage to be touched and formed by life.

When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.

The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.

I have found that life is alive and we are requested to have a friendship with it, to have a conversation with life and that conversation is restorative and healing and always nearby.

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.

We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.

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.

If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.

The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.

The point of experience is not to escape life but to live it.