Mary Oliver Quotes

I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work.

When you wash your hands, when you make a cup of coffee, when you're waiting for the elevator - instead of indulging in thinking, these are all opportunities for being there as a still, alert presence.

You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.

Everywhere I go, I still have time to meditate. People think meditating is sitting there, nobody bothering you, but you can even talk and still meditate.

I just try to concentrate on concentrating.

One of the best things to do sometimes is simply to be.

When there are thoughts, it is distraction: when there are no thoughts, it is meditation.

Stillness as a technique is still really captivating to me.

I can meditate anywhere, anytime, even whilst talking to you.

'Rectify' is un-busy. It might soothe you, if not distract you, from all you got going on.

There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.

I look at what's in front of me. I concentrate on that and then hopefully move on.

I try to take each moment at a time.

As you walk, you simply walk. Don't go ahead, don't jump here and there. Mind always go ahead or lag behind. Remain with the moment.

While doing work if the mind continues to be active let it be so, but there must be at the same time a capacity for silence.

Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.

Great peace is found in little busy-ness.

Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective.

You can look only when the mind is completely quiet.

Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?

There are two things you can do with your head down - play golf and pray.

And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear.