Mary Oliver Quotes

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

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

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

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

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.

When it is over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things; I want to be light and frolicsome; I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing.

How wonderful that the universe is beautiful in every corner.

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

The world offers itself to your imagination.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on.

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

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.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

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

Leave some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

It’s not a competition, it’s a doorway.

Mary Oliver Quotes part 2

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

When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement.

Emerson said, the soul of the poet might find peace in solitude.

I believe in kindness.

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning.

I want to be light and frolicsome, and I want to be able to fly.

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut…

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 a little while but the moon and me.

I don’t have to be good. I just have to be bold.

I will not live a life of regret. I will not live in fear.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.

The world is made of stories, not atoms.

The beauty that returns, brighter than ever, but only to the heart that is burning with truth.

There is only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and forget everybody else! It sound egotistical, but it’s actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity.

For some it is books, a bench in the park, or a dog. For others it is a space in their lives just large enough to walk, or close to walk.

It’s difficult to accept that in dying we don’t leave the world, but we take the world with us.

Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.

I am floating into the blue, to rise with power in the world, to rise with power in the excuse of God.

Percy waits by the wayside for those who have forgotten the art of being kind.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable, beautiful, and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.

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.

I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door–a thousand opening doors! past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.

Here at last is what I’ve been trying to tell you.