Rumi - The Essential Rumi

35 Sourced Quotes

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Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded.
Someone sober will worry about events going badly.
Let the lover be.

Rumi
Every object and being in the universe is
a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty,
a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained
by any skin. Every jarful spills and makes the earth
more shining, as though covered in satin.

Rumi
The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you don't belong with us.

Rumi
Gamble everything for love,
if you are a true human being.

Rumi
Learn from Ali how to fight
without your ego participating.
God's lion did nothing
that didn't originate
from his deep center.

Rumi
Silence
is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don't walk
into the language-river. Listen to the ocean,
and bring your talky business to an end Traditional words are just babbling
in that presence, and babbling is a substitute
for sight.

Rumi
Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still.

Rumi
This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

Rumi
The place that Solomon made to worship in,
called the Far Mosque, is not built of earth
and water and stone, but of intention and wisdom
and mystical conversation and compassionate action.

Rumi
I can't stop pointing
to the beauty. Every moment and place says,
"Put this design in your carpet!"

Rumi
From Hallaj, I learned to hunt lions, but I became something hungrier than a lion.

Rumi
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

Rumi
Lovers think they are looking for each other,
but there is only one search: wandering
This world is wandering that, both inside one
transparent sky. In here
there is no dogma and no heresy.

Rumi
This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with you.
Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.
There's no room for lack of trust, or trust.
Nothing in this existence but that existence.

Rumi
What is the body? That shadow of a shadow
of your love, that somehow contains
the entire universe.

Rumi
Observe the wonders as they occur around you.
Don't claim them. Feel the artistry
moving through, and be silent.

Rumi
Do not believe in an absurdity
no matter who says it.

Rumi
You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open.

Rumi
There is a community of the spirit
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.

Rumi
I am God's Lion, not the lion of passion....
I have no longing
except for the One.
When a wind of personal reaction comes,
I do not go along with it.
There are many winds full of anger,
and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around,
but the solid mountain of our true nature stays where it's always been.

Rumi
This
that we are now
created the body, cell by cell,
like bees building a honeycomb. The human body and the universe
grew from this, not this
from the universe and the human body.

Rumi
Disputational knowing wants customers.
It has no soul.

Rumi
All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

Rumi
The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future. Forget the future.
I'd worship someone who could do that.

Rumi
We talk about this and that. There's no rest except on these branching moments.

Rumi
I go into the Muslim mosque and the Jewish synagogue and the Christian church and I see one altar.

Rumi
Spring is Christ,
Raising martyred plants from their shrouds.
Their mouths open in gratitude, wanting to be kissed.
The glow of the rose and the tulip means a lamp is inside.
A leaf trembles. I tremble in the wind-beauty like silk from Turkestan.
The censer fans into flame. This wind is the Holy Spirit.
The trees are Mary.

Rumi
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence. Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

Rumi
Christ is the population of the world,
and every object as well. There is no room
for hypocrisy. Why use bitter soup for healing
when sweet water is everywhere?

Rumi
There is no reality but God,
says the completely surrendered sheik, who is an ocean for all beings.

Rumi