Mary Oliver Quotes

The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.

Those who find beauty in all of nature will find themselves at one with the secrets of life itself.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together.

The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.

Nature is actually the greatest democracy in the world.

Nature expresses a design of love and truth.

The rose petal floats on water. The kingfisher flashes above the pond. Life and beauty swirl in the midst of death.

Diversity creates harmony, and harmony creates beauty, balance, bounty and peace in nature and society, in agriculture and culture, in science and in politics.

It all boils down to this: that all life is interrelated.

In the world's audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight.

What honor can there be without humility? What heights can be reached without being low? The pieces of a chariot are useless unless the work in accordance with the whole A man's life brings nothing unless he lives in accordance with the whole universe Playing one's part in accordance with the universe is true humility So whether you're a gem in the royal court or a stone on the common path If you accept your part with humility the glory of the universe will be yours

Water and stone Flesh and bone Night and morn Rose and thorn Tree and wind Heart and mind

All that is harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me. Everything is fruit to me that your seasons bring, Nature. All things come of you, have their being in you, and return to you.

We are the children equally of the Sky and the Earth.

How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence.

Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.

A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies there is no end to the air. However the fish and the bird have never left their elements. Thus each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its realm... Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish... practice, enlightenment and people are like this.

Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole.

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

Never does nature say one thing and Wisdom another. Variant: Wisdom and Nature! are they not the same? Variant: Nature and Wisdon always speak alike.

Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.

We are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live his life for himself alone.

It is the task of the architect to give life a gentler structure.

When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast.