Finding Inner Courage Quotes

“there is a great choice that awaits us every day: whether we go around carving holes in others because we have been so painfully carved ourselves, or whether we let spirit play its song through our tender experience, enabling us to listen, as well, to the miraculous music coming through others.”
― Mark Nepo, Finding Inner Courage

“So in your days, when feeling narrow and needing to broaden, when feeling less and needing to deepen, put down what seems certain and reach for what seems clear. Know you are a sun rising and falling along a tenuous horizon, like all the suns before you, strung between forces that both enlarge and shrink your sense of life. It is a beautifully difficult set of tensions that only those blessed to be alive can experience. Like hot notes on timeless strings, we are music fingered by the gods.”
― Mark Nepo, Finding Inner Courage

“The Greeks believed this to be a part of human nature. Whether it becomes a destructive or healing energy in the world depends largely on whether that spirit of fight or struggle is directed in self-centered ways at the disappointments we experience in not getting what we want, or in deeper, self-transforming ways that seek out the resources of spirit, love, and truth. It seems to be perennially true that if that spirit of fight or struggle is not directed at what distances us from God (our isolations and illusions), then it will be directed at others. Needleman suggests that the misdirection of Thumos, our spirit of fight or struggle, has been a timeless source of war, evil, and unnecessary woundedness in the world.”
― Mark Nepo, Finding Inner Courage