Mary Oliver Quotes

I feel guilty when people say I'm the greatest on the scene. What's good or bad doesn't matter to me; what does matter is feeling and not feeling. If only people would take more of a true view and think in terms of feelings. Your name doesn't mean a damn, it's your talents and feelings that matter. You've got to know much more than just the technicalities of notes; you've got to know what goes between the notes.

I don't think many people get to play big emotions in life.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don't.

I'm a passionate person; there's a lot going on underneath my carousel of blazers: a cauldron of sensitivity and emotion.

Emotion is a full range of a spectrum, like colours. It's not just anger. How are you going to get that out with just a guitar and screaming? You need to explore everything else.

My talent before singing is being able to interpret and understand my emotions. I've felt pain and felt it intensely, so every time I sing, I revisit it.

To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery.

Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.

An intelligent mind is an inquiring mind. It is not satisfied with explanation, with conclusions. Nor is it a mind that believes, because belief is again another form of conclusion.

When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart.

There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.

A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity.

I think anybody who's working in a creative medium is working partially with their conscious mind, partially with their unconscious mind. So, my unconscious mind may be a little more distorted and violent than I am aware of.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.

Teaching is not the mere imparting of information but the cultivation of an inquiring mind which will penetrate into the question of what is religion and not merely accept the established religions, churches, and rituals.

Sometimes, you can incorporate things that you've experienced in your life and use that. And, other times, you just know what that feeling of hurt, love, anger and depression is, and you do whatever it takes to get there in your mind, and use it to your advantage, whichever way it works best.

To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.

Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.

I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

Our minds, bodies, feelings, relationships are all informed by our questions. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what you search for. And what shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking.

I found it quite easy to carry on a casual conversation it was as if my real feelings were down fathoms deep in my mind and what we said was just a feathery surface spray.