Prepare to be inspired by these amazing Mary Oliver quotes! Whether or not you are into poetry… there’s a lot to learn, ponder, and evaluate when it comes to these sayings. So, let these carefully crafted words, by this famous poet, provoke your curiosity!
Mary Oliver Love Quotes
1. “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
2. “We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.” – Mary Oliver
3. “Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.” – Mary Oliver
4. “We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.” – Mary Oliver
5. “It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.” – Mary Oliver
6. “Therefore, dark past, I’m about to do it. I’m about to forgive you for everything.” – Mary Oliver
7. “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
8. “There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?” – Mary Oliver
9. “Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving.” – Mary Oliver
10. “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.” – Mary Oliver
11. “Breathe it all in, love it all out.” – Mary Oliver
12. “And I say to my heart: Rave on.” – Mary Oliver
13. “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
Poetry & Work Quotes
14. “My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—equal seekers of sweetness.” – Mary Oliver
15. “Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.” – Mary Oliver
16. “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” – Mary Oliver
17. “Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.” – Mary Oliver
18. “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
19. “A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry.” – Mary Oliver
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Mary Oliver Life Quotes
20. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver
21. “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” – Mary Oliver
22. “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” – Mary Oliver
23. “It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.” – Mary Oliver
24. “It’s not a competition, it’s a doorway.” – Mary Oliver
25. “I know many lives worth living.” – Mary Oliver
26. “Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.” – Mary Oliver
27. “And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility of your life.” – Mary Oliver
28. “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” – Mary Oliver
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29. “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
30. “What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.” – Mary Oliver
31. “Maybe death isn’t darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us as soft as feathers.” – Mary Oliver
32. “Always, there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.” – Mary Oliver
33. “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
34. “I believe In kindness. Also in mischief.” – Mary Oliver
35. “It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.” – Mary Oliver
36. “It’s not the weight you carry but how you carry it. Books, bricks, grief. It’s all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it when you cannot, and would not, put it down.” – Mary Oliver
37. “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
38. “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
Inspirational Quotes
39. “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.” – Mary Oliver
40. “Happiness isn’t a town on a map, or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work ongoing.” – Mary Oliver
41. “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” – Mary Oliver
42. “As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules.” – Mary Oliver
43. “How could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?” – Mary Oliver
44. “There are things you can’t reach, but you can reach out to them, and all day long.” – Mary Oliver
45. “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
46. “Why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?” – Mary Oliver
47. “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
48. “Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.” – Mary Oliver
49. “When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included?” – Mary Oliver
I hope these quotes have inspired you today! Make sure to save your favorite and share with friends who need a pick me up or check out more hand picked quotes below
