185 Quotes by Mark Nepo

We are born with only one obligation – to be completely who we are.

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.

For only when we can outwait the dark will the sharpness of experience recede like a tide to reveal what has survived beneath it all. Often what seems tragic, if looked at long enough, reveals itself as part of a larger transformation.

If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.

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

But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.

Through the opened heart, the world comes rushing in, the way oceans fill the smallest hole along the shore. It is the quietest sort of miracle: by simply being who we are, the world will come to fill us, to cleanse us, to baptize us, again and again.

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

The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again.