Mary Oliver Quotes - Page 3

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

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

Each body is a lion of courage, something precious of the earth.

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.

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

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.

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

... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry.

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

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.

Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.

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.

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.

There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.

Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.

Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned--- if not enough else--- to live with my eyes open.

So every day So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.

Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light – good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

Invention hovers always a little above the rules.

When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?