12 Illuminating Stephen Cope Quotes from The Great Work Of Your Life on Mastery and Fulfillment

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Excerpt: These 12 deep quotes from The Great Work Of Your Life will help you live more deliberately, more aligned, and in a more meaningful way.

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Introduction: Dharma Living

Below you will find our list of 12 Stephen Cope quotes from The Great Work Of Your Life. The intention behind this collection of quotes is to illuminate ideas in your mind that will help you live more deliberately, more aligned, and in a more meaningful way. Once you can align your aptitudes, interests, and potential with the problems in the world (your world) that you feel need to be solved (or are drawn to), you’ll be on your way to living a life of meaning and impact—not one that’s just superficially fun.

This is what The Great Work Of Your Life is all about. It’s about aligning your life with your dharma and doing great work that will give you that sense of fulfillment that we all crave. The idea of “dharma” comes from the 2,000 year old treatise on yoga called the Bhagavad Gita. It is a potent Sanskrit word that is packed tight with meaning, but Cope explains that Dharma, for the purposes of the book, will mean primarily “vocation,” or “sacred duty.” In the Hindu tradition, every human being has a unique vocation and one of the major challenges of life is to come home to that true self.

This is where you fit into the theme of this book and this post.

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Assuming it’s true that every human being has a unique vocation, the question is—have you discovered yours? Have you “come home” to that true self that is a reflection of your deepest drives, unique talents and interests, and full potential? Or are you disconnected in some way? These are important questions to reflect on regularly and this post will certainly trigger those types of thoughts.

Without further ado, please enjoy our collection of quotes from The Great Work Of Your Life below and we hope they help you do just that. Reflect, redirect your aim accordingly, and do work that leads you in the right direction. Enjoy!

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The List: 12 Illuminating Stephen Cope Quotes from The Great Work Of Your Life on Mastery and Fulfillment

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“The yoga tradition is very, very interested in the idea of an inner possibility harbored within every human soul. Yogis insist that every single human being has a unique vocation. They call this dharma. Dharma is a potent Sanskrit word that is packed tight with meaning…Dharma means, variously, “path,” “teaching,” or “law.” For our purposes in this book it will mean primarily “vocation,” or “sacred duty.” It means, most of all—and in all cases—truth. Yogis believe that our greatest responsibility in life is to this inner possibility—this dharma—and they believe that every human being’s duty is to utterly, fully, and completely embody his own idiosyncratic dharma.”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“We work first because we have to work. Then because we want to work. Then because we love to work. Then the work simply does us. Difficult at the beginning. Inevitable at the end.”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“People actually feel happiest and most fulfilled when meeting the challenge of their dharma in the world, when bringing highly concentrated effort to some compelling activity for which they have a true calling.  For most of us this means our work in the world.  And by work, of course, I do not mean only ‘job.’”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“You cannot be anyone you want to be.  Your one and only shot at a fulfilled life is being yourself – whoever that is.  Furthermore, at a certain age it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.  This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s dream and eschewed our own: No one really cares except us.  When you scratch the surface, you finally discover that it doesn’t really matter a whit who else you disappoint if you’re disappointing yourself.  The only question that makes sense to ask is: Is your life working for you?”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“To organize life’s energies around anything less sublime than our true nature is to still be split – separated from Self.  No matter how much focus we may bring to any task, if the task is not our real vocation we will still be haunted by the suffering of doubt, and the internal agony of division.”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“Our work can be motivated by obligation, by hunger for the external rewards of accomplishment, or by strongly reinforced ideas about who we should be in this lifetime.  But none of these motivations has the authentic energy required for mastery of a profession.”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“It is well known that expert meditators develop the capacity to see life in slow motion, observing objects (including their own thoughts) in minute detail, as if seeing every individual frame of a movie.  It turns out that masters in every field develop the same capacity.  Master baseball players, for example, when at bat, see the ball coming at them as if in slow motion – even though the ball is actually traveling 90 miles an hour.  Not only can the master batter see the ball in ‘individual frame’ detail, but he can at the same time see the meaning of those details.  How low is the ball to the ground?  Over what quadrant of the plate will it pass?  Is it spinning?  In what direction?  How will all of this detail influence my decision about how and where I want to hit the ball?  This is mastery.”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“[Ludwig van] Beethoven came to see that complete surrender to his situation in life – to his deafness, to his various neuroses – was absolutely essential for his own spiritual development and for the development of his art.  He accepted the apparent mystery that his art and his suffering were inextricably linked.”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“The whole world is inside each person, each being, each object.  To know any part of the world deeply, intimately, is to know the whole world.  Each of us, then, must find our own particular domain – that little corner of the world in which we can drill for gold.  For the acupuncturist it is knowing the body through the language of Chinese medicine.  For the painter, it is knowing the world through through paint and the canvas.  For the writer, it is knowing the world through words.”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“I know people who have been stuck in doubt their entire lifetime.  Each of these unfortunate individuals – some of them my very own friends and family – came at some point to a crossroads.  They came to this crossroads and found themselves rooted there, with one foot firmly planted on each side of the intersection.  Alas, they never moved off the dime.  They procrastinated.  Dithered.  Finally, they put a folding chair smack in the center of that crossroads and lived there for the rest of their lives.  After a while, they forgot entirely that there even was a crossroads – forgot that there was a choice.”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“When we reach sixty-two, we are likely to interpret feelings of exhaustion and boredom as the signal to retire.  But couldn’t they just as easily be the call to reinvent ourselves?  As we age it seems harder and harder to let our authentic dharma reinvent us.  We imagine somehow that the risks are greater.  We tend to think that leaping off cliffs is for the young.  But no.  Actually – when better to leap off cliffs?”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

“At the end of life, most of us will find that we have felt most filled up by the challenges and successful struggles for mastery, creativity, and full expression of our dharma in the world.  Fulfillment happens not in retreat from the world, but in advance – and profound engagement.”

Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

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If you enjoyed these quotes from The Great Work Of Your Life then you should definitely pick up Stephen Cope’s book. It comes highly recommended:

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