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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 Dream Work (1986)

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Mary Oliver

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

New and Selected Poems (1992)

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2005)

But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.

Blue Iris (2004)

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Blue Pastures (1995)

Among the swans there is none called the least,
or the greatest.

Evidence (2009)

All Mary Oliver quotes →

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False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Socrates

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

Edward Teller

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mary Oliver (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.