Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī:
Or simply Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273)
13th-century Persian poet, Hanafi faqih (jurist), Islamic scholar, Maturidi theologian (mutakallim),[9] and Sufi mystic originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran.
I choose to love you in silence….For in silence I find no rejection.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.
I looked in temples, churches, and mosques. But I found the Divine within my heart.
Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.
I want to sing like the birds sing, not worry about who hears it or what they think.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Do not feel lonely, the entire Universe is inside you!
Do not go sightseeing. The real journey is right here. The great excursion starts from exactly where you are. You are the world. You have everything you need. You are the secret. You are the wide opened.
When I am silent, I have thunder hidden inside.
I slept well last night, but I woke up drunk….I must have dreamt about You !
Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets. The moon sets. But they are not gone.
Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it. It will turn to gold. Resurrection will be now. Every moment, a new beauty.
Why struggle to open a door between us, when the whole wall is an illusion?
If you only say one prayer in a day, make. ‘Thank you’.
I closed my eyes and spoke to you in a thousand, silent ways. In that darkness I created my own light.
You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?
Do not sell your soul in exchange of anything, this is the only thing you have brought into this world and the only thing you can take back.
This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
I have been a seeker and still I am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my soul.
On the path of Love we are neither masters nor the owners of our lives. We are only a brush in the hand of the Master Painter.
When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music.
When we practice loving kindness and compassion we are the first ones to profit.
Don’t you know yet? It is your light that lights the worlds.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Even though you cannot see the end, it may be there is no end. Still, start out on whatever is your way.
Don’t sit and wait. Get out there, feel life. Touch the sun, and immerse in the sea.
These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.
My dear heart, never think you are better than others. Listen to their sorrows with compassion.
I seek no heart but yours, I hurry only towards you.
You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.
Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.
If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?
The moment you understand something, you are free of it.
Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.
You can beat 40 scholars with one fact, but you can’t beat one idiot with 40 facts.
Let silence take you to the core of life.
A flower is a flower wherever it may grow.
There comes a time when nothing is meaningful except surrendering to love. Do it.
Necessity turns lion into fox.
Love has come to rule and transform; stay awake, my heart, stay awake.
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction.
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.
Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
At night, I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its face against mine. Breathe into me. Close the language-door and open the love-window. The moon won’t use the door, only the window.
I was dead, then alive. Weeping, then laughing. The power of love came into me, and I became fierce like a lion, then tender like the evening star.
Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
Do you know what you are? You are a manuscript of a divine letter. You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that.
Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.
What you seek, is seeking you.
Only from your heart you can touch the sky.
Let the water settle; you will see the moon and stars mirrored in your being.
It’s your road, and yours alone. Others may walk with you, but no one can walk it for you.
