Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive – that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.”

— Mary Oliver

152. “Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.”

— Mary Oliver

153. “Okay, I said. But remember, you can’t fix everything in the world for everybody. “However,” said Ricky, “you can’t do anything at all unless you begin.”

— Mary Oliver

154. “Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. But isn’t the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?”

— Mary Oliver

155. “I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.”

— Mary Oliver

156. “Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.”

— Mary Oliver

157. “I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Reading Quotes

158. “And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.”

— Mary Oliver

159. “But how did you come burning down like a wild needle, knowing just where my heart was?”

— Mary Oliver

160. “Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”

— Mary Oliver

161. “Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?”

— Mary Oliver

162. “A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.”

— Mary Oliver

163. “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

164. “There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.”

— Mary Oliver

165. “If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves. If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt. But if you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation. I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster. And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with some small and easy story.”

— Mary Oliver

166. “Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame.”

— Mary Oliver

167. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

168. “Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”

— Mary Oliver

169. “Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude? Have I endured loneliness with grace?”

— Mary Oliver

170. “The wasp sits on the porch of her paper castle.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

172. “I believe everything has a soul.”

— Mary Oliver

173. “But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus.”

— Mary Oliver

174. “That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die.”

— Mary Oliver

175. “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.”

— Mary Oliver

176. “Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.”

— Mary Oliver

177. “How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?”

— Mary Oliver

178. “I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.”

— Mary Oliver

179. “Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?”

— Mary Oliver

180. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

181. “When it’s over I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real...”

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Real Quotes

182. “The subjects that stir the heart are not so many, after all, and they do not change.”

— Mary Oliver

183. “For the birds who own nothing – the reason they can fly.”

— Mary Oliver

184. “Congratulations, if you have changed.”

— Mary Oliver

185. “Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness.”

— Mary Oliver

186. “What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?”

— Mary Oliver

187. “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

188. “And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”

— Mary Oliver

189. “I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple – or a green field – a place to enter, and in which to feel.”

— Mary Oliver

190. “I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.”

— Mary Oliver

191. “I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn’t just an idea.”

— Mary Oliver

192. “I know many lives worth living.”

— Mary Oliver

193. “Come with me to visit the sunflowers, they are shy but want to be friends;.”

— Mary Oliver

194. “Invention hovers always a little above the rules.”

— Mary Oliver

195. “Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules.”

— Mary Oliver

196. “Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born.”

— Mary Oliver

197. “On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?”

— Mary Oliver

198. “Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale-pink morning light.”

— Mary Oliver

199. “I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.”

— Mary Oliver

200. “I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. 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. 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