Mary Jane Oliver was an outstanding American poet, she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work Mary Jane Oliver is inspired by nature.
If you are looking for Mary Oliver Quotes, then browse through our collection of Mary Oliver Quotes that we have collected from many sources on the internet.
Best Mary Oliver Quotes
- “I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned—that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness, the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books, can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.” – Mary Oliver
- “And that is just the point—how the world, moist and beautiful, calls 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?’” – Mary Oliver
- “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “There are things you can’t reach, but you can reach out to them, and all day long.” – Mary Oliver
- “In the beginning, I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it. Before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” – Mary Oliver
- “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “It’s not a competition, it’s a doorway.” – Mary Oliver
- “For some things, there are no wrong seasons—which is what I dream of for me.” – Mary Oliver
- “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?” – Mary Oliver
- “After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.” – Mary Oliver
Related : Abraham Hicks Quotes - “May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe—tiny but useful.” – Mary Oliver
- “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
- “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” – Mary Oliver
- “Love yourself, then forget it. Then, love the world.” – Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver Quotes On Life
- “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver
- “You must not ever give anyone else the responsibility for your life.” – Mary Oliver
- “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” – Mary Oliver
Related : Kakashi Quotes - “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.” – Mary Oliver
- “I believe in kindness, also in mischief; also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.” – Mary Oliver
- “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.” – Mary Oliver
- “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “Whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.” – Mary Oliver
- “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “We are not wise, and not very often kind; and much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left.” – Mary Oliver
- “It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.” – Mary Oliver
- “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” – Mary Oliver
Famous Mary Oliver Quotes
- “It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning, in this broken world.” – Mary Oliver
Related : Eckhart Tolle Quotes - “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly, I know our part is not knowing; but looking, and touching, and loving.” – Mary Oliver
- “Always, there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.” – Mary Oliver
- “It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.” – Mary Oliver
- “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
- “This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings, or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular.” – Mary Oliver
- “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “How could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?” – Mary Oliver
- “So every day, I was surrounded by the beautiful, crying forth of the ideas of God—one of which was you.” – Mary Oliver
- “I held my breath, as we do sometimes, to stop time when something wonderful has touched us.” – Mary Oliver
Related : Kim Possible Quotes - “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “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?” – Mary Oliver
- “Also, I wanted to be able to love, and we all know how that one goes, don’t we?” – Mary Oliver
- “I know many lives worth living.” – Mary Oliver
- “You may not agree, you may not care, but if you are holding this book you should know that of all the sights I love in this world—and there are plenty—very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes.” – Mary Oliver
- “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” – Mary Oliver
- “My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums…” – Mary Oliver
Inspirational Mary Oliver Quotes
- “Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.” – Mary Oliver
- “When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included?” – Mary Oliver
- “There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?” – Mary Oliver
Related : Best Jiraiya Quotes - “There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled. Like telling someone you love them, or giving your money away—all of it. Your heart is beating, isn’t it? You’re not in chains, are you? There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even possibly, your own.” – Mary Oliver
- “Every morning, I walk like this around the pond, thinking—if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.” – Mary Oliver
- “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.” – Mary Oliver
- “Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.” – Mary Oliver
- “Happiness isn’t a town on a map, or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work ongoing.” – Mary Oliver
- “So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience.” – Mary Oliver
- “If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?” – Mary Oliver
- “He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.” – Mary Oliver
- “When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement.” – Mary Oliver
- “The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.” – Mary Oliver
Related : Boss Babe Quotes - “Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?” – Mary Oliver
- “In this universe, we are given two gifts—the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.” – Mary Oliver
- “You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.” – Mary Oliver
- “My life without you would be a place of parched and broken trees.” – Mary Oliver
- “If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.” – Mary Oliver
- “What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.” – Mary Oliver
- “I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it breaks open and never closes again to the rest of the world.” – Mary Oliver
- “Even the most solitudinous of us is communal by habit, and indeed by commitment to the bravest of our dreams, which is to make a moral world.” – Mary Oliver
- “And did you feel it in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?” – Mary Oliver
- “If I had another life, I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.” – Mary Oliver
Related : Shadow Quotes - “Be ignited, or be gone.” – Mary Oliver
- “You have broken my heart. Just as well. Now, I am learning to rise above all that, learning the thin life, waking up simply to praise everything in this world that is strong and beautiful always—the trees, the rocks, the fields, the news from heaven, the laughter that comes back all the same.” – Mary Oliver
Thanks for viewing this collection of Mary Oliver Quotes ! Don’t forget to share them on social media. Which of Mary Oliver Quotes collection is your favorite? Don’t forget to comment on them down below!