Mary Oliver
Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.Collection: Heart
Attention without feeling is only a report.Collection: Feelings
Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light – good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.Collection: Morning
The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.Collection: Nature
He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Rainy Day
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Fire
You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Love
I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us.Collection: Sometimes
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 nothingCollection: Life
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.Collection: Giving
You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.Collection: Opportunity
And I say to my heart: rave on.Collection: Life
All eternity is in the moment.Collection: Moments
There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?Collection: Love
There is only one question: / how to love this world.Collection: World
We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Rivers
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. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing-that the light is everything-that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Inspirational
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.Collection: Lonely
Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Weed
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?Collection: Prayer
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.Collection: World
It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.Collection: Somewhere Else
Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.Collection: Children
In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.Collection: Fifty
I know many lives worth living.Collection: Life Worth Living
Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.Collection: Adjectives And Adverbs
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.Collection: Inspirational
I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.Collection: Spring
The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.Collection: Sweet
You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.Collection: Mistake
Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?Collection: Want
How many mysteries have you seen in your lifetime? How many nets pulled full over the boat's side, each silver body ready or not falling into submission? How many roses in early summer uncurling above the pale sands then falling back in unfathomable willingness? And what can you say? Glory to the rose and the leaf, to the seed, to the silver fish. Glory to time and the wild fields, and to joy. And to grief's shock and torpor, its near swoon.Collection: Summer
It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Stars
Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.Collection: Sentences
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.Collection: Prayer
When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.Collection: Real
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.Collection: World
...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.Collection: Voice
Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.Collection: Today