Mary Oliver Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

All eternity is in the moment.

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 want to end up simply having visited this world.

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

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

And I say to my heart: rave on.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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