Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention...”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

53. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

55. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

56. “It is what I was born for – to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over...”

— Mary Oliver

57. “Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.”

— Mary Oliver

58. “Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.”

— Mary Oliver

59. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

60. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

61. “I simply do not distinguish between work and play.”

— Mary Oliver

62. “The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don’t say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person’s character shines or glooms.”

— Mary Oliver

63. “The sea is the most beautiful face in our universe.”

— Mary Oliver

64. “Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.”

— Mary Oliver

65. “If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.”

— Mary Oliver

66. “Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.”

— Mary Oliver

67. “We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness.”

— Mary Oliver

68. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

70. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

71. “Attention without feeling – is only a report.”

— Mary Oliver

72. “I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.”

— Mary Oliver

73. “Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.”

— Mary Oliver

74. “Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.”

— Mary Oliver

75. “I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild an want it back.”

— Mary Oliver

76. “Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.”

— Mary Oliver

77. “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

78. “Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.”

— Mary Oliver

79. “So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.”

— Mary Oliver

80. “Of course! The path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. It’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.”

— Mary Oliver

81. “You must not ever stop being whimsical.”

— Mary Oliver

82. “Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.”

— Mary Oliver

83. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

84. “I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.”

— Mary Oliver

85. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

86. “It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”

— Mary Oliver

87. “Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”

— Mary Oliver

88. “You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need any more of that sound.”

— Mary Oliver

89. “Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

91. “The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.”

— Mary Oliver

92. “What will you do with your one precious, wild life?”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

94. “The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions, to comfort himself, makes music.”

— Mary Oliver

95. “There are lots of ways to dance and to spin, sometimes it just starts my feet first then my entire body, I am spinning no one can see it but it is happening. I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be loving and loved. Even if I were close to the finish, even if I were at my final breath, I would be here to take a stand, bereft of such astonishments, but for them. If I were a Sufi for sure I would be one of the spinning kind.”

— Mary Oliver

96. “What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?”

— Mary Oliver

97. “The world is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery.”

— Mary Oliver

98. “May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.”

— Mary Oliver

99. “Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving.”

— Mary Oliver

100. “The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.”

— Mary Oliver