Top 90 Mary Oliver Quotes to Inspire You
Have we ever considered the positive effect of adding more poetry into our lives? When we’re feeling bad, poetry has a way of calming us down. This collection of Mary Oliver quotes features powerful and honest lines from her poems, which will offer you a whole new outlook on life.
Mary Oliver Quotes
Below, we have compiled some of the most motivational Mary Oliver quotes on life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Enjoy!
1. “Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me.”
2. “Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”
3. “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.”
4. “There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long.”
5. “Maybe death isn’t darkness, after all.”
6. “You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth, the world doesn’t need anymore of that sound.”
7. “Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.”
8. “And now you’ll be telling stories of my coming back, and they won’t be false, and they won’t be true, but they’ll be real.”
9. “He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”
10. “Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.”
Little by Little Inspiring Quotes
11. “Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.”
12. “Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.”
13. “You have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.”
14. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on.”
15. “I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”
16. “There was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world.”
17. “This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”
18. “Ten times a day something happens to me like this – some strengthening throb of amazement–some good sweet empathic ping and swell.”
Mary Oliver Poetry Quotes
19. “But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.”
20. “I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
21. “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.”
22. “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
23. “Let me keep company always with those who say ‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”
24. “Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.”
25. “I simply do not distinguish between work and play.”
26. “Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.”
27. “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.”
28. “And to tell the truth I don’ want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.”- Mary Oliver
29. “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
Pay Attention Quotes
30. “Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”
31. “it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.”
32. “But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.”
33. “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it…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.”
34. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul.
35. Wasn’t it Emerson who said, ‘My life is for itself and not for a spectacle? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.
36. To tell you the truth, I believe everything – tigers, trees, stones – are sentient in one way or another. You’d never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.
37. I grew up in a confused house: too much-unwanted attention or none at all.
38. I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else. childhood
Poems of Hope
39. I had a very dysfunctional family and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
40. I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
41. Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they’re thirsty. That’s prayer. They don’t live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.
42. I’d rather write about polar bears than people.
43. I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.
44. “It is better for the heart to break than not to break.”
45. “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
46. “It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning, in this broken world.”
47. “I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
48. “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.”
Poems about Life and Love
49. “You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.”
50. “I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.”
51. “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.”
52. “It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”
53. “Joy is not made to be a crumb. “
54. “Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be musical inside yourself.”
55. “My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—equal seekers of sweetness.”
56. “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.”
57. “Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.”
58. “Keep some room in your heart for the Unimaginable”
Whimsical Quotes
59. “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.”
60. “Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.”
61. “You’re like a little wild thing that was never sent to school.”
62. “Look, hasn’t my body already felt like the body of a flower?”
63. “For some things, there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.”
64. “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
65. “May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.”
67. “You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.”
68. “There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even your own.”
Quotes For Attention and Care
69. “All things are meltable and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.”
70. “Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”
71. “When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.”
72. And to tell the truth, I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness. I don’t want to sell my life for money. I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.”
73. “It’s not a competition, it’s a doorway.”
74. “For some things, there are no wrong seasons—which is what I dream of for me.”
75. “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?”
76. “After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.”
77. “May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe—tiny but useful.”
78. “I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. Oh, motions of tenderness!”
Mary Oliver Dog Poems
79. “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.”
80. “Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly, I know our part is not knowing; but looking, and touching, and loving.”
81. “Always, there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.”
82. “It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.”
83. “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.”- Mary Oliver
84. “This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings, or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular.”
85. “Dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person about his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.”
Short Poems about Hope
86. “How could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?”
87. “So every day, I was surrounded by the beautiful, crying forth of the ideas of God—one of which was you.”
88. “I held my breath, as we do sometimes, to stop time when something wonderful has touched us.”
89. Listen—are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”
90. “From the complications of loving you, I think there is no end or return. No answer, no coming out of it. Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?”
91. “Also, I wanted to be able to Love, and we all know how that one goes, don’t we?”
92. “I know many lives worth living.”- Mary Oliver.
Finally, Mary Oliver offered us many words to live by, and she taught us that we are in charge of our own lives. Only we can determine what is best for us and what we truly desire in life. So be honest with yourself, be brave, and accept who you are. We can develop our finest selves by doing so.
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CSN Team.
