Mary Oliver Quotes

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

Perception rules the world. Everyone knows that. Where we live and where we're from, you just can't escape it.

There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

Every ecosystem, even a small one, is sustainable because it has certain ensembles and conditions and influences that are unique to it. And the biological ensembles are almost certainly, even the most modest ones, in the thousands of species. We don't know what's involved in the models - not even the beginnings. And yet we're trying to make a sustainable world, which has to include the natural world. The human species is triumphant, but it's got to get a grip. It's got to come to understand what's happened, why we're this way and what we're doing.

at the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.

Wildness is not just the "preservation of the world," it is the world

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too. And that, by some miracle, the language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

If we [humans] disappeared overnight, the world would probably be better off.

dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.

I see the world as an illusion, and we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously

Nothing in this world is real

Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us.

Until we stop clinging to the concept of good and evil, the world will continue to manifest as friendly goddesses and harmful demons.

Nature...cannot be fooled!

We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.

What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.

An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.

There is no more honorable thing any of us can do with our lives than to work to put part of the world off-limits to the activities of human beings.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.