Luce > Luce's Quotes

“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.”
― Mary Oliver

“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“Tell me,
what is it you plan to do
with your one
wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
― Mary Oliver, Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
― Mary Oliver

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”
― Mary Oliver

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.

--from WHEN DEATH COMES”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”
― Mary Oliver White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

“And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
― Mary Oliver

“Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.”
― Mary Oliver

“it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.”
― Mary Oliver

“I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

“For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

“We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.”
― Mary Oliver

“It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.”
― Mary Oliver

“Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.”
― Mary Oliver

“There is truth in wine and children”
― Plato, Symposium / Phaedrus

“The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”
― Plato

“People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.”
― Plato

“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”
― Plato, The Republic

“For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.”
― Plato, Theaetetus

“Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.”
― Plato, The Republic

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.”
― Plato

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”
― Rumi

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”
― Rumi