Quotes about Rumi

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel the shepherd's love filling you.

The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.

"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.

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.

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

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

Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

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.

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.