Mary Oliver Quotes

I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.

Mary Oliver

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Quotes to Explore

• Scripture suggests that the elements in space were created for the benefit of earth, while evolution suggests that earth is an insignificant speck in vast space.

  

  Walter Lang
  • Earth
  • Space
  • Evolution

• The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

  

  Wallace Stevens
  • World
  • Find
  • Difficult

• If Boston charters can be stymied despite their extraordinary success, charters anywhere can be stopped.

  

  Brown Campbell
  • Success
  • Stopped
  • Boston

• I'm married. I've been with my husband for six years. Now that I know what a healthy relationship is, I find I can write better about the unhealthiness of relationships.

  

  Rachel Bloom
  • Relationship
  • Husband

• Big Business can make laws as easily as it can break them - and with as little impunity.

  

  Ralph Chaplin
  • Business
  • Break
  • Laws

• In this era in which we live, the old-fashioned virtues grow increasingly unpopular.

  

  B. Carroll Reece
  • Live
  • Grow
  • Old-fashioned

• I struggled with being a broke college graduate, and while all my friends were getting career jobs, I was working horrible part-time jobs. That's why now, even when I get tired, I think, 'This is what I asked for.'

  

  J. Cole
  • Time
  • Why
  • Friends

• In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.

  

  Pankaj Mishra
  • English
  • First
  • Birthday

• For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there's such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it's such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.

  

  Garrett Hedlund
  • Mother
  • Feeling
  • Stories

• Well I do think, when there are more women, that the tone of the conversation changes, and also the goals of the conversation change. But it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women. If you think that, you've forgotten high school.

  

  Madeleine Albright
  • World
  • Women
  • School

• Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham
  • People
  • Good
  • Bad

• The world does not look to us in the Arab world out of a healthy desire for knowledge.

  

  Tahar Ben Jelloun
  • World
  • Knowledge
  • Desire

• He who improves an opportunity sows a seed which will yield fruit in opportunity for himself and others.

  

  Orison Swett Marden
  • Opportunity
  • Fruit
  • Seed

• The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that we should be separate, all right, but in this separate state or separate existence, the black man should be given the opportunity and the incentive to do for himself what the white man has done for himself.

  

  Malcolm X
  • Done
  • Man
  • Black

• The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.

  

  Nathan Myhrvold
  • Food
  • Water
  • Cooking

• The food system is not a free market. In this country, we impose reasonably high standards of animal welfare - but we haven't applied the same standards to food we import, so all we're really doing is exporting cruelty from Britain elsewhere, and at the same time undermining our farmers.

  

  Zac Goldsmith
  • Time
  • Country
  • High

• I don't want to set the world up for surprises.

  

  Barry Diller
  • Up
  • World
  • Want

• I'm obsessive. That's the word for me. I obsess – perhaps to the point where it's moderately dysfunctional. I tend to put a book through about 100 revisions. If anything, that's an understatement. If there's another author out there who does this sort of revision, I would really like to meet him. Maybe we could form some sort of support group.

  

  Patrick Rothfuss
  • Book
  • Group
  • Tend

• It's been phenomenal, but everybody keeps congratulating me on my resurgence and my big comeback. I haven't been away, guys. I've been working steadily for the last 63 years.

  

  Betty White
  • Comeback

• I am grateful to the activists and women who created the Black Lives Matter movement because I feel like they let me know I wasn't crazy.

  

  Jesmyn Ward
  • Women
  • Black
  • Crazy

• When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since.

  

  Oscar Niemeyer
  • Mother
  • Day
  • Air

• I have a memory of this experience when I was young, watching 'Stop Making Sense,' the Talking Heads concert movie, which is one of the best concert movies ever, and I saw it in a full house in New Zealand, and everyone was cheering between songs, and you really felt like you were part of the audience at the gig.

  

  David MacKenzie
  • Experience
  • Movie
  • House

• What we also have to recognize is that the deficit levels that I'm inheriting, over a trillion dollars, coming out of last year, that that is unsustainable. At a certain point, other countries stop buying our debt, at a certain point, we'd end up having to raise interest rates, and it would end up creating more economic chaos and potentially inflation.

  

  Barack Obama
  • Up
  • Country
  • Money

• I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.

  

  Mary Oliver
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