Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Life Quotes, Motivational Quotes About Life, Life Lessons Quotes, Choices Quotes, Mindfulness Quotes

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

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Live Life Quotes, Meaning Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes, Different Quotes, Travel Quotes

3. “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

Featured in: Poetry Quotes, Desire Quotes, Quotes About Feelings, Joy Quotes, Love Is Quotes

4. “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Experience Quotes, Curiosity Quotes, Life is Beautiful Quotes

5. “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

— Mary Oliver

6. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Relationship Quotes, Moving On Quotes, Loss Quotes, Appreciation Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes

7. “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.”

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Time Quotes, Patience Quotes, Serenity Quotes, Contentment Quotes

8. “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

Featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Sorrow Quotes, Healing Grief Quotes, Grief Quotes

9. “We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.”

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Sorrow Quotes, Grief Quotes

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

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Kindness Quotes

11. “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

Featured in: Creativity Quotes, Creative Quotes

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

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Mindfulness Quotes

13. “And I say to my heart: rave on.”

— Mary Oliver

14. “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Journey Quotes

15. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Life is Beautiful Quotes, Life Quotes for Women

16. “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

— Mary Oliver

17. “Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”

— Mary Oliver

18. “All eternity is in the moment.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

20. “I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

23. “Things take the time they take. don’t worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?”

— Mary Oliver

24. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

26. “My work is loving the world.”

— Mary Oliver

27. “Come with me into the woods where spring is advancing, as it does, no matter what, not being singular or particular, but one of the forever gifts, and certainly visible.”

— Mary Oliver

28. “I got saved by poetry and I got saved by the beauty of the world.”

— Mary Oliver

29. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

30. “Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

35. “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

36. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

37. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

40. “Don’t we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.”

— Mary Oliver

41. “I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.”

— Mary Oliver

42. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

43. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

44. “Why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

46. “Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

48. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

50. “I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars.”

— Mary Oliver