Quote

This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.

Mary Oliver

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mary Oliver
Age: 83 †
Born: 1935
Born: September 10
Died: 2019
Died: January 17
Climate Activist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Maple Heights
Ohio
Mary Jane Oliver
Firsts
First
Wildest
Thing
Wisest
Entirely
Exists
Built
Attention
Soul

More quotes by Mary Oliver

Image
All eternity is in the moment.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
You must not ever stop being whimsical.
Mary Oliver
Image
Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
Mary Oliver
Image
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
Mary Oliver
Image
Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
Mary Oliver
Image
All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing
Mary Oliver
Image
How heron comes It is a negligence of the mind not to notice how at dusk heron comes to the pond and stands there in his death robes, perfect servant of the system, hungry, his eyes full of attention, his wings pure light
Mary Oliver
Image
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
Mary Oliver
Image
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
Mary Oliver
Image
Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
Mary Oliver
Image
Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
Image
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Mary Oliver
Image
It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
Image
With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
Mary Oliver
Image
Poetry is a river many voices travel in it poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless each arrives in an historical context almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.
Mary Oliver