The Best Mary Oliver Quotes On Love, Nature, Life And Aging

“snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.

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?

You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.

Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.

I’d rather write about polar bears than people.

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.
tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
meanwhile the world goes on.
meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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.

Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day – which is what I did.

The poet with his face in his hands

you want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

so if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

It’s very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can’t wait until morning – it’ll be gone.

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.

I go down to the shore

i go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? and the sea says
in its lovely voice:
excuse me, I have work to do.

…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,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

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

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.

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

Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.

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

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.

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.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

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.

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

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

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.

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

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

How I go to the woods

ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.

i don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.

besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. 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.

I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Love yourself. Then forget it.
then, love the world.

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.

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

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

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

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.

The uses of sorrow

(in my sleep I dreamed this poem)

someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

it took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

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

The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they’re full of bicycle trails.

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 grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.

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.

Instructions for living a life.
pay attention.
be astonished.
tell about it.

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

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”)

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

Listen–are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?.

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

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.

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

I consider myself kind of a reporter – one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

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. (don’t hesitate).

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.

when it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
i don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

i don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

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.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

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.

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 love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn’t think of it as a career. I didn’t even think of it as a profession… It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?.

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.

I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.

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

The journey

one day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“mend my life!”
each voice cried.
but you didn’t stop.
you knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
it was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
but little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and 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,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.