Quotes about Rumi

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in eachother all along.

"This discipline and rough treatment are a furnace to extract the silver from the dross. This testing purifies the gold by boiling the scum away."

Rumi

PS: Here's to boiling our scum away!

There is some kiss we want
with our whole lives,
the touch of Spirit on the body.

At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come
and press its face against mine.
Breathe into me.

“The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.”  Rumi

“The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. 
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”

"Mitarosho miharosh" -rumi
"Sharpen your pencil, and scratch your paper" - translated by Nader Khalili

Set your life on fire.
Seek those who fan your flames.
~Rumi

We Are ALL The Same

Listen to the reeds as they sway apart;
Hear them speak of lost friends.
At birth, you were cut from your bed,
Crying and grasping in separation.
Everyone listens, knowing your song.

You yearn for others who know your name,
And the words to your lament.
We are all the same, all the same,
Longing to find our way back;
Back to the one, back to the only one.

Open to me, so that I may open.
Provide me your inspiration
So that I might see mine.

And You? When will you begin that long journey into Yourself?

At every instant and from every side, resounds the call of Love:
We are going to sky, who wants to come with us?
We have gone to Heaven, we have been the friends of the angels,
And now we will go back there, for there is our country.

The Beloved

One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked.
A voice asked: 'Who is there?' He answered: 'It is I.'
The voice said: 'There is no room here for me and thee.'
The door was shut.

After a year of solitude and deprivation
this man returned to the door of the Beloved.
He knocked.
A voice from within asked: 'Who is there?'
The man said: 'It is Thou.'
The door was opened for him.
Rumi

"Thinking gives off smoke to prove the existence of fire. A mystic sits inside the burning. There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination loves to watch. But it's a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight. Stay here at the flame's core."

This silence, this moment, every moment, if it's genuinely inside you, brings what you need. There's nothing to believe. Only when I stopped believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, 'Be more silent.' Die and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you've died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.

Thou art not that body: thou art this spiritual Eye.

If you put on shoes that are too tight and walk out
across an empty plain,you will not feel the freedom
of the place unless you take off your shoes.
Your shoe-constriction has you confined.
At night before sleeping you take off the tight shoes,
and your soul releases into a place it knows.
Dreams glide deeper.

Physical existence is so cramped.We grow old and bent over
like embryos.Nine months passes;it is time to be born.
The lamb wants to graze green daylight.
There are ways of being born twice,of coming
to where you fly,not individually like birds,
but as the sun moves with his bride,sincerity.

Loaves of bread remind us of sunlight,
but when we are inside that orb,we lose interest
in building ovens,in millwork and the preparation
of fields before the planting.

Fish love the ocean.Snakes move like earth-fish
inside a mountain,well away from seawater.
Certain sunfish,though,turn snakes into ocean lovers.

"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...

Make peace with the universe.  Take joy in it. It will turn to gold.  Resurrection will be now.  Every moment, a new beauty."

Can you find another market like this? / Where, / with your one rose / you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

One of the startling prospects that Rumi and Shams bring to the world of mystical awareness, which turns out to be ordinary consciousness as well, is the suggestion that we "fall in love in such a way that it frees us from any connecting." what that means is that we become friendship. "When living itself becomes the Friend, lovers disappear." That is, a human being can become a field of love (compassion, generosity, playfulness), rather than being identified with any particular synapse of lover and beloved. The love-ache widens to a plain of longing at the core of everything: the absence-presence center of awareness. Rumi went in search of the missing Shams. The story is that he was on a street in Damascus when the realization came that he *was* their Friendship. No separation, no union, just he was that at the silent core. I'd have to say that's the *baraka* (a blessing, the particular grace of taking in presence), the mystery of the ecstatic life.

"Out beyond the ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I will meet you there."  - Rumi

You are the truth from foot to brow.
 Now what else would you like to know?       

A lover asked his beloved, do you love yourself more than you love me? The beloved replied, I have died to myself and I live for you... I've disappeared from myself and my attributes. I am present only for you. I have forgotten all my learning, but from knowing you, I have become a scholar. I have lost all my strength, but from your power, I am able. If I love myself I love you. If I love you I love myself... 

" There was a dawn I remember
when my soul heard something from your soul. 
I drank water from your spring
and felt the current take me in."
 - Jalal Ud Din Rumi

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or Zen. Not any religion, or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, nor out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body nor soul. I belong to the beloved have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, First, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human

They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.
In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul
and you are that.
But we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone.

Come, come, whoever you are
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving
It doesn't matter
Our is not a caravan of despair
Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times
Come, come yet again, come.

Cry Out In Your Weakness
A dragon was pulling a bear into its terrible mouth.

A courageous man went and rescued the bear.
There are such helpers in the world, who rush to save
anyone who cries out.  Like Mercy itself,
they run toward the screaming.

And they can't be bought off.
If you were to ask one of those, "Why did you come
so quickly?" he or she would say, "Because I heard
your helplessness."

Where lowland is,
that's where water goes.  All medicine wants
is pain to cure

And don't just ask for one mercy.
Let them flood in.  Let the sky open under your feet.
Take the cotton out of your ears, the cotton
of consolations, so you can hear the sphere-music…

Accept your new good luck.

Give your weakness
to one who helps.

Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning-whimper
and she's there.

God created the child, that is, your wanting
so that it may cry out, so that milk might come.

Cry out!  Don't be stolid and silent
with your pain.  Lament!  And let the milk
of loving flow into you.

The hard rain and wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us.

Be patient.
Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.

Ignore those that make you fearful
and sad, that degrade you
back toward disease and death.

   -Rumi