Top 313 Quotes & Sayings by Mary Oliver - Page 2

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.

I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.

Apparently, I've been considered a recluse.

I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.

As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.

All eternity is in the moment.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Things take the time they take. Don't worry.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. (from “Mysteries, Yes”)

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone. When I'm alone I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?

It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that's often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving

There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.

Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Praying It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.

I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.

So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees - to learn something by being nothing

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?

This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.

Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree... Of course I have to give up, but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder of it--the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.

Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride, married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. Instructions for living a life: pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves-we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together, we are each other's destiny.

Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

Look, I want to love this world as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get to be alive and know it.

You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

There are things you can’t reach. But You can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god. And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier. I look; morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around As though with your arms open.

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled-to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing-that the light is everything-that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?

We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.

It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.

There is only one question: / how to love this world.

And I say to my heart: rave on.