Happiness

• “Wisdom is like rain.
  Its supply is unlimited, but it comes down according to what the occasion requires –
  in winter and spring, in summer and autumn,
  always in due measure, more or less,
  but the source of that rain is the oceans itself, which has no limits.”
• Without the frown of clouds and lightning, the vines would be burned by the smiling sun. Rumi
• Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.Rumi
• Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder. Rumi
• Don’t be sad! Because God sends hope in the most desperate moments. Don’t forget, the heaviest rain comes out of the darkest clouds. Rumi
• I am dying into your mystery and dying, I am now no other than that mystery. I open to your majesty as an orchard welcomes rain, and twenty times that. Rumi
• Rush out in the rain to be soaked with the sky. Rumi
• Tender words we spoke to one another are sealed in the secret vaults of heaven. One day like rain, they will fall to earth and grow green all over the world. Rumi
• All that you think is rain is not. Behind the veil angels sometimes weep. Rumi
• We can’t help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water. Milk drinkers draw close to the mother. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, shamans, everyone hears the intelligent sound and moves with a thirst to meet it.
  Rumi

• The core of the seen and unseen universe smiles, but remember smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter.Rumi
• Things are such that someone lifting a cup, or watching the rain, petting a dog, or singing, just singing – could be doing as much for this universe as anyone. Rumi
• Daniel Ladinsky, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (2012). “The Purity of Desire: 100 Poems of Rumi”, p.67, Penguin
• A warm, rainy day-this is how it feels when friends get together. Friend refreshes friend then, as flowers do each others, in a spring rain. Rumi
• Wisdom is like the rain. Its source is unlimited, but it comes down according to the season. Grocers put sugar in a bag, but their supply of sugar is not the amount in the bag. When you come to a grocer, he has sugar in abundance. But he sees how much money you have brought and gives accordingly. Your currency on this Path is resolution and faith, and you are taught according to your resolution and faith. When you come seeking sugar, they examine your bag to see what its capacity is; then they measure out accordingly. Rumi
• Wisdom is like the rain. Its source is limitless, but it comes down according to the season. Rumi
• When it’s cold and raining, you are more beautiful. And the snow brings me even closer to your lipsThe inner secret, that which was never born, you are that freshness, and I am with you now.I can’t explain the goings or the comings. You enter suddenly, and I am nowhere again. Inside the majesty Rumi
• I feel like the earth, astonished at fragrance borne in the air, made pregnant with mystery from a drop of rain. Rumi
• Love’s secret is always lifting its head out from under the covers, “Here I am!” ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Be empty of worrying…. Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life. ~Rumi
• Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that light becomes this art. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Camille and Kabir Helminski
• Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. ~Rumi
• Daylight, full of small dancing particles and the one great turning, our souls are dancing with you, without feet, they dance. Can you see them when I whisper in your ear? ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment… ~Rumi, translated by Edward Henry Whinfield
• Why are you so enchanted by this world, when a mine of gold lies within you? ~Rumi
• Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened…. Let the beauty we love be what we do. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth. ~Rumi
• Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting! They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can’t see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Why should I stay at the bottom of a well when a strong rope is in my hand? ~Rumi, as interpreted by Jonathan Star
• A secret freedom opens through a crevice you can barely see. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown. My heart is expanding a thousand fold. ~Rumi, translated by Shahram Shiva
• As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears. ~Rumi
• You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life? ~Rumi
• Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. ~Rumi
• Lightning, your presence from ground to sky, no one knows what becomes of me, when you take me so quickly. ~Rumi
• How can I know anything about the past or the future, when the light of the Beloved shines only Now. ~Rumi
• What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached. ~Rumi
• Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. ~Rumi
• Ignorance is God’s prison. Knowing is God’s palace. ~Rumi
• This world’s existence is one night long. There’s a great lively gathering that night, but some people sleep through it. ~Rumi
• If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished? ~Rumi
• There is a morning inside you waiting to burst open into Light. ~Rumi
• Whosoever knoweth the power of the dance, dwelleth in God. ~Rumi
• Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Can you find another market like this? Where, with your one rose, you can buy hundreds of rose gardens? ~Rumi
• 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. ~Rumi
• The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. ~Rumi
• This is how we are with wine and beautiful food… we want and we get drunk with wanting, then the headache and bitterness afterward. ~Rumi
• And don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. It’s quiet, but the roots are down there riotous. ~Rumi
• The core of the seen and unseen universe smiles, but remember smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter. ~Rumi
• I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside! ~Rumi
• The way the night knows itself with the moon, be that way with me. Or, alternately translated, Union is a raging river running toward the sea. Tonight the moon kisses the stars. O beloved, be like that to me. ~Rumi
• In each moment the fire rages, it will burn away a hundred veils. And carry you a thousand steps toward your goal. ~Rumi
• Before death takes away what you are given, give away what there is to give. ~Rumi
• Now is the time to unite the soul and the world. Now is the time to see the sunlight dancing as one with the shadows. ~Rumi
• Birdsong brings relief to my longing. I am just as ecstatic as they are, but with nothing to say. ~Rumi
• Come, whoever you are! Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. This is not a caravan of despair. It doesn’t matter if you’ve broken your vow a thousand times, still and yet again come! ~Rumi
• Isn’t it time to turn your heart into a temple of fire? ~Rumi
• Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins? ~Rumi
• Your legs will get heavy and tired. Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you’ve grown, lifting. ~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
• This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I’ll be completely sober. ~Rumi
• I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. ~Rumi
• I am iron resisting the most enormous magnet there is. ~Rumi
• You sit here for days saying, This is strange business. You’re the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine. You’re some weird kind of gold that wants to stay melted in the furnace, so you won’t have to become coins. ~Rumi
• You’ve gotten drunk on so many kinds of wine. Taste this. It won’t make you wild. It’s fire. Give up, if you don’t understand by this time that your living is firewood. ~Rumi
• Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love. ~Rumi
• Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible. ~Rumi
• Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings…. Leave and don’t look away from the sun as you go, in whose light you’re sometimes crescent, sometimes full. ~Rumi
• Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings. Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move. ~Rumi
• Take sips of this pure wine being poured. Don’t mind that you’ve been given a dirty cup. ~Rumi
• Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion. ~Rumi
• There is a way of breathing that’s a shame and a suffocation and there’s another way of expiring, a love breath, that lets you open infinitely. ~Rumi
• Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who’s there. ~Rumi
• There’s a hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness. We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox is stuffed full of anything, no music…. When you’re full of food and drink, Satan sits where your spirit should…. ~Rumi
• The mind, this globe of awareness, is a starry universe that when you push off with your foot, a thousand new roads become clear, as you yourself do at dawn, sailing through the light. ~Rumi
• Gamble everything for love, if you’re a true human being. If not, leave this gathering. ~Rumi
• Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. ~Rumi
• No one knows what makes the soul wake up so happy! Maybe a dawn breeze has blown the veil from the face of God. ~Rumi
• …a great God-wrestling does on inside these wanderers… ~Rumi
• …the cypress tree is turning green, drunk with the forest. ~Rumi
• Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars mirrored in your own being. ~Rumi
• …rush out in the rain to be soaked with the sky. ~Rumi
• He is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, Live. ~Rumi

• Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you. ~Rumi
• Into my heart’s night
  Along a narrow way
  I groped; and lo! the light,
  An infinite land of day.
  ~Rumi
• Love comes with a knife, not some shy question, and not with fears for its reputation! ~Rumi
• Love is a madman, working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, running through the mountains…. ~Rumi
• Come out here where the roses have opened. Let the soul and world meet. ~Rumi
• You’ve been walking the ocean’s edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry. You must dive naked under, and deeper under, a thousand times deeper! ~Rumi
• Don’t put blankets over the drum! Open completely. Let your spirit ear listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur. ~Rumi
• What does this patch-sewing mean you ask? Eating and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body is always getting torn. You patch it with food and other ego-satisfactions. ~Rumi
• This is how I would die into the love I have for you: as pieces of cloud dissolve in sunlight. ~Rumi
• That hurt we embrace becomes a joy. Call it to your arms where it can change. ~Rumi
• I don’t regret how much I love, and I avoid those who repent their passion. ~Rumi
• There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then, there’s another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity. ~Rumi
• You must lance an ulcer to heal it. You must tear down parts of an old building to restore it, and so it is with a sensual life that has no spirit in it. ~Rumi
• To change, a person must face the dragon of his appetites with another dragon, the life-energy of the soul. ~Rumi
• When your love contracts in anger, the atmosphere itself feels threatening. But when you’re expansive, no matter what the weather, you’re in an open, windy field with friends. ~Rumi
• Water the fruit trees and don’t water the thorns. ~Rumi
• Purify your eyes, and see the pure world. Your life will fill with radiant forms. ~Rumi
• How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you’re always flying off to blue perfection? ~Rumi
• Where will you plant your grief-seeds? We need the ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire. ~Rumi
• If you yearn for holy felicity, shed your arrogance and become a seeker of hearts. ~Rumi
• If all you can do is crawl, start crawling. ~Rumi
• This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and attend them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honourably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. ~Rumi
• Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover, and then are taken off. That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath, is the sweetness that comes after grief. ~Rumi
• Let yourself become living poetry. ~Rumi
• Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar. Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where you go on the street, the street where everyone says, “How are you?” and no one says How aren’t you? ~Rumi
• There is a fountain inside you. Don’t walk around with an empty bucket. ~Rumi
• Is what I say true? Say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe. ~Rumi
• You are a fountain of the sun’s light. I am a willow shadow on the ground. You make my raggedness silky. ~Rumi
• You fill yourself with the sharp pain of love, rather than its fulfilment. ~Rumi
• I do not know who lives here in my chest, or why the smile comes. I am not myself, more the bare green knob of a rose that lost every leaf and petal to the morning wind. ~Rumi
• Something opens our wings, something makes boredom and hurt disappear. ~Rumi
• When I am with you, we stay up all night
  When you are not here, I can’t go to sleep
  Praise God for this two insomnia!
  And the difference between them.
  ~Rumi (John Moyne & Coleman Barks)
• Inside of us, there’s continual autumn. Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water. ~Rumi
• If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring. ~Rumi
• In this mob of I’s inside, which one is me? Hear me out. I know I’m wandering, but don’t start putting a lid on this racket. No telling what I’ll do then. Every moment I’m thrown by your story. One moment it’s happy, and I’m singing. One moment it’s sad, and I’m weeping. It turns bitter, and I pull away. But then you spill a little grace, and just like that, I’m all light. It’s not so bad, this arrangement, actually. ~Rumi
• This love is the rose that blooms forever. ~Rumi
• Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking. ~Rumi
• All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light. ~Rumi
• If you knew yourself for even one moment, if you could just glimpse your most beautiful face, maybe you wouldn’t slumber so deeply in that house of clay. Why not move into your house of joy and shine into every crevice! For you are the secret Treasure-bearer, and always have been. Didn’t you know? ~Rumi
• …my heart sinks like a comb into wave after wave of your silky hair. ~Rumi
• If you want to be more alive, love is the truest health. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• And if you are a rose, I am rose-shadow. ~Rumi
• I turn all thorn then, but you come back again and make my thorniness fragrant and pink and petaled. ~Rumi
• Try another way of looking. Try you looking and the whole universe seeing. ~Rumi
• Tonight the moon kisses the stars. ~Rumi
• And even if this world burns up hidden harps will still play here. ~Rumi
• Even when tied in a thousand knots, the string is still but one. ~Rumi
• The garden of love is green without limit and yields much fruit other than sorrow and joy. ~Rumi
• Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd. ~Rumi
• Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free. ~Rumi
• Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Let lovers be crazy, disgraceful, and wild
  Those who fret about such things
  Aren’t in love.
  ~Rumi, as interpreted by Deepak Chopra
• Only from the heart can you touch the sky. ~Rumi
• ’Tis the fire of love that inspires the flute,
  ’Tis the ferment of love that possesses the wine.
  ~Rumi, translated by E.H. Whinfield [Per Whinfield, Love signifies the strong attraction that draws all creatures back to reunion with their Creator. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]
• When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy. When action come from another section, the feeling disappears. ~Rumi
• If you could untie your wings and free your soul of jealousy, you and everyone around you would fly up like doves. ~Rumi
• I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars. ~Rumi
• The wound is the place where the Light enters you. ~Rumi
• Be occupied, then, with what you really value and let the thief take something else. ~Rumi
• I want your sun to reach my raindrops, so your heat can raise my soul upward like a cloud. ~Rumi
• Come sit with me! Let us drink the holy wine of happiness. ~Rumi
• You go from village to village on your horse asking everyone, “Has anyone seen my horse?” ~Rumi
• The ocean of the body crashes against the ocean of the heart. Between them is a barrier they cannot cross. ~Rumi
• Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure. ~Rumi
• Quotations about Rumi and His Translators
• Across time, place, and culture, Rumi’s poems articulate what it feels like to be alive, and they help us understand our own search for love and the ecstatic in the coil of daily life. ~Lee Briccetti
• Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn’t know you needed transforming. ~Jerry Stahl
• [The] combination of mystical richness and bold adaptations of poetic forms is the key to [Rumi’s] popularity… ~Jawid Mojaddedi
• Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person. ~Robert Bly
• [Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity… like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral… ~Coleman Barks
• Ramana Maharshi and Rumi would agree: the joy of being human is in uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin. ~Coleman Barks
• [Rumi’s words are an] expression of praise and grief and gratitude and play. ~Coleman Barks
• What I deeply want… is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self. ~Coleman Barks
• If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable. ~Huston Smith
• Some translators turn an author’s words from gold to stone; others befit them with wings which exalt the words to heaven. ~Terri Guillemets [Coleman Barks! —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]
• Good poetry, like music or a sweet touch, can doctor us up, be an antidote for an hour or longer, help us to get dressed for another day—combat the blues enough to mount the horse again; and maybe even aid one in laying down the insidious weight of some old grudge or deep-rooted anxiety. Herein enters Rumi…. draws us near to his—and our own—inner light…. From head to toe this guy is blazing. He is like a cyclone one wants to be drawn into… ~Daniel Ladinsky
• Love’s secret is always lifting its head out from under the covers, “Here I am!” ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Be empty of worrying…. Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life. ~Rumi
• Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that light becomes this art. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Camille and Kabir Helminski
• Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. ~Rumi
• Daylight, full of small dancing particles and the one great turning, our souls are dancing with you, without feet, they dance. Can you see them when I whisper in your ear? ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment… ~Rumi, translated by Edward Henry Whinfield
• Why are you so enchanted by this world, when a mine of gold lies within you? ~Rumi
• Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened…. Let the beauty we love be what we do. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth. ~Rumi
• Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting! They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can’t see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Why should I stay at the bottom of a well when a strong rope is in my hand? ~Rumi, as interpreted by Jonathan Star
• A secret freedom opens through a crevice you can barely see. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown. My heart is expanding a thousand fold. ~Rumi, translated by Shahram Shiva
• As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears. ~Rumi
• You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life? ~Rumi
• Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. ~Rumi
• Lightning, your presence from ground to sky, no one knows what becomes of me, when you take me so quickly. ~Rumi
• How can I know anything about the past or the future, when the light of the Beloved shines only Now. ~Rumi
• What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached. ~Rumi
• Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. ~Rumi
• Ignorance is God’s prison. Knowing is God’s palace. ~Rumi
• This world’s existence is one night long. There’s a great lively gathering that night, but some people sleep through it. ~Rumi
• If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished? ~Rumi
• There is a morning inside you waiting to burst open into Light. ~Rumi
• Whosoever knoweth the power of the dance, dwelleth in God. ~Rumi
• Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Can you find another market like this? Where, with your one rose, you can buy hundreds of rose gardens? ~Rumi
• 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. ~Rumi
• The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. ~Rumi
• This is how we are with wine and beautiful food… we want and we get drunk with wanting, then the headache and bitterness afterward. ~Rumi
• And don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. It’s quiet, but the roots are down there riotous. ~Rumi
• The core of the seen and unseen universe smiles, but remember smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter. ~Rumi
• I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside! ~Rumi
• The way the night knows itself with the moon, be that way with me. Or, alternately translated, Union is a raging river running toward the sea. Tonight the moon kisses the stars. O beloved, be like that to me. ~Rumi
• In each moment the fire rages, it will burn away a hundred veils. And carry you a thousand steps toward your goal. ~Rumi
• Before death takes away what you are given, give away what there is to give. ~Rumi
• Now is the time to unite the soul and the world. Now is the time to see the sunlight dancing as one with the shadows. ~Rumi
• Birdsong brings relief to my longing. I am just as ecstatic as they are, but with nothing to say. ~Rumi
• Come, whoever you are! Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. This is not a caravan of despair. It doesn’t matter if you’ve broken your vow a thousand times, still and yet again come! ~Rumi
• Isn’t it time to turn your heart into a temple of fire? ~Rumi
• Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins? ~Rumi
• Your legs will get heavy and tired. Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you’ve grown, lifting. ~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
• This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I’ll be completely sober. ~Rumi
• I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. ~Rumi
• I am iron resisting the most enormous magnet there is. ~Rumi
• You sit here for days saying, This is a strange business. You’re a strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine. You’re some weird kind of gold that wants to stay melted in the furnace, so you won’t have to become coins. ~Rumi

• You’ve gotten drunk on so many kinds of wine. Taste this. It won’t make you wild. It’s fire. Give up, if you don’t understand by this time that your living is firewood. ~Rumi
• Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love. ~Rumi
• Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible. ~Rumi
• Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings… Leave and don’t look away from the sun as you go, in whose light you’re sometimes crescent, sometimes full. ~Rumi
• Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings. Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move. ~Rumi
• Take sips of this pure wine being poured. Don’t mind that you’ve been given a dirty cup. ~Rumi
• Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion. ~Rumi
• There is a way of breathing that’s a shame and suffocation and there’s another way of expiring, a love breath, that lets you open infinitely. ~Rumi
• Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who’s there. ~Rumi
• There’s a hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness. We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox is stuffed full of anything, no music…. When you’re full of food and drink, Satan sits where your spirit should…. ~Rumi
• The mind, this globe of awareness, is a starry universe that when you push off with your foot, a thousand new roads become clear, as you yourself do at dawn, sailing through the light. ~Rumi
• Gamble everything for love, if you’re a true human being. If not, leave this gathering. ~Rumi
• Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. ~Rumi
• No one knows what makes the soul wake up so happy! Maybe a dawn breeze has blown the veil from the face of God. ~Rumi
• …a great God-wrestling does on inside these wanderers… ~Rumi
• …the cypress tree is turning green, drunk with the forest. ~Rumi
• Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars mirrored in your own being. ~Rumi
• …rush out in the rain to be soaked with the sky. ~Rumi
• He is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, Live. ~Rumi
• Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you. ~Rumi
• Into my heart’s night
  Along a narrow way
  I groped; and lo! the light,
  An infinite land of day.
  ~Rumi
• Love comes with a knife, not some shy question, and not with fears for its reputation! ~Rumi
• Love is a madman, working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, running through the mountains…. ~Rumi
• Come out here where the roses have opened. Let soul and world meet. ~Rumi
• You’ve been walking the ocean’s edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry. You must dive naked under, and deeper under, a thousand times deeper! ~Rumi
• Don’t put blankets over the drum! Open completely. Let your spirit ear listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur. ~Rumi
• What does this patch-sewing mean you ask? Eating and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body is always getting torn. You patch it with food and other ego-satisfactions. ~Rumi
• This is how I would die into the love I have for you: as pieces of cloud dissolve in sunlight. ~Rumi
• That hurt we embrace becomes joy. Call it to your arms where it can change. ~Rumi
• I don’t regret how much I love, and I avoid those who repent their passion. ~Rumi
• There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then, there’s another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity. ~Rumi
• You must lance an ulcer to heal it. You must tear down parts of an old building to restore it, and so it is with a sensual life that has no spirit in it. ~Rumi
• To change, a person must face the dragon of his appetites with another dragon, the life-energy of the soul. ~Rumi
• When your love contracts in anger, the atmosphere itself feels threatening. But when you’re expansive, no matter what the weather, you’re in an open, windy field with friends. ~Rumi
• Water the fruit trees and don’t water the thorns. ~Rumi
• Purify your eyes, and see the pure world. Your life will fill with radiant forms. ~Rumi
• How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you’re always flying off to blue perfection? ~Rumi
• Where will you plant your grief-seeds? We need the ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire. ~Rumi
• If you yearn for holy felicity, shed your arrogance and become a seeker of hearts. ~Rumi
• If all you can do is crawl, start crawling. ~Rumi
• This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and attend them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. ~Rumi
• Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover, and then are taken off. That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath, is the sweetness that comes after grief. ~Rumi
• Let yourself become living poetry. ~Rumi
• Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar. Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where you go on the street, the street where everyone says, “How are you?” and no one says How aren’t you? ~Rumi
• There is a fountain inside you. Don’t walk around with an empty bucket. ~Rumi
• Is what I say true? Say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe. ~Rumi
• You are a fountain of the sun’s light. I am a willow shadow on the ground. You make my raggedness silky. ~Rumi
• You fill yourself with the sharp pain of love, rather than its fulfillment. ~Rumi
• I do not know who lives here in my chest, or why the smile comes. I am not myself, more the bare green knob of a rose that lost every leaf and petal to the morning wind. ~Rumi
• Something opens our wings, something makes boredom and hurt disappear. ~Rumi
• When I am with you, we stay up all night
  When you are not here, I can’t go to sleep
  Praise God for this two insomnia!
  And the difference between them.
  ~Rumi (John Moyne & Coleman Barks)
• Inside of us, there’s continual autumn. Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water. ~Rumi
• If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring. ~Rumi
• In this mob of I’s inside, which one is me? Hear me out. I know I’m wandering, but don’t start putting a lid on this racket. No telling what I’ll do then. Every moment I’m thrown by your story. One moment it’s happy, and I’m singing. One moment it’s sad, and I’m weeping. It turns bitter, and I pull away. But then you spill a little grace, and just like that, I’m all light. It’s not so bad, this arrangement, actually. ~Rumi
• This love is the rose that blooms forever. ~Rumi
• Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking. ~Rumi
• All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light. ~Rumi
• If you knew yourself for even one moment, if you could just glimpse your most beautiful face, maybe you wouldn’t slumber so deeply in that house of clay. Why not move into your house of joy and shine into every crevice! For you are the secret Treasure-bearer, and always have been. Didn’t you know? ~Rumi
• …my heart sinks like a comb into wave after wave of your silky hair. ~Rumi
• If you want to be more alive, love is the truest health. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• And if you are a rose, I am rose-shadow. ~Rumi
• I turn all thorn then, but you come back again and make my thorniness fragrant and pink and petaled. ~Rumi
• Try another way of looking. Try you looking and the whole universe seeing. ~Rumi
• Tonight the moon kisses the stars. ~Rumi
• And even if this world burns up hidden harps will still play here. ~Rumi
• Even when tied in a thousand knots, the string is still but one. ~Rumi
• The garden of love is green without limit and yields much fruit other than sorrow and joy. ~Rumi
• Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd. ~Rumi
• Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free. ~Rumi
• Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be. ~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks
• Let lovers be crazy, disgraceful, and wild Those who fret about such things Aren’t in love.
  ~Rumi, as interpreted by Deepak Chopra
• Only from the heart can you touch the sky. ~Rumi
• ’Tis the fire of love that inspires the flute,
  ’Tis the ferment of love that possesses the wine.
  ~Rumi, translated by E.H. Whinfield [Per Whinfield, Love signifies the strong attraction that draws all creatures back to reunion with their Creator. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]
• When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy. When action come from another section, the feeling disappears. ~Rumi
• If you could untie your wings and free your soul of jealousy, you and everyone around you would fly up like doves. ~Rumi
• I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars. ~Rumi
• The wound is the place where the Light enters you. ~Rumi
• Be occupied, then, with what you really value and let the thief take something else. ~Rumi
• I want your sun to reach my raindrops, so your heat can raise my soul upward like a cloud. ~Rumi
• Come sit with me! Let us drink the holy wine of happiness. ~Rumi
• You go from village to village on your horse asking everyone, “Has anyone seen my horse?” ~Rumi
• The ocean of the body crashes against the ocean of the heart. Between them is a barrier they cannot cross. ~Rumi
• Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure. ~Rumi
• Quotations about Rumi and His Translators
• Across time, place, and culture, Rumi’s poems articulate what it feels like to be alive, and they help us understand our own search for love and the ecstatic in the coil of daily life. ~Lee Briccetti
• Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn’t know you needed transforming. ~Jerry Stahl
• [The] combination of mystical richness and bold adaptations of poetic forms is the key to [Rumi’s] popularity… ~Jawid Mojaddedi
• Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person. ~Robert Bly
• [Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity… like the sense, you might get walking into a cathedral… ~Coleman Barks
• Ramana Maharshi and Rumi would agree: the joy of being human is in uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin. ~Coleman Barks
• [Rumi’s words are an] expression of praise and grief and gratitude and play. ~Coleman Barks
• What I deeply want… is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self. ~Coleman Barks
• If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable. ~Huston Smith
• Some translators turn an author’s words from gold to stone; others befit them with wings that exalt the words to heaven. ~Terri Guillemets [Coleman Barks! —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]
• Good poetry, like music or a sweet touch, can doctor us up, be an antidote for an hour or longer, help us to get dressed for another day—combat the blues enough to mount the horse again; and maybe even aid one in laying down the insidious weight of some old grudge or deep-rooted anxiety. Herein enters Rumi…. draws us near to his—and our own—inner light…. From head to toe this guy is blazing. He is like a cyclone one wants to be drawn into… ~Daniel Ladinsky

• “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.” ― Rumi
• “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
  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.” ― Rumi
• “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ― Rumi
• “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” ― Rumi
• “What you seek is seeking you.” ― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
• “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” ― 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.”― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi
• “Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.” ― Rumi
  “Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.”― Rumi
• “If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?” ― Rumi
• “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ― Rumi, The Essential Rumi
• “You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?” ― Rumi
• “Forget safety.
  Live where you fear to live.
  Destroy your reputation.
  Be notorious.”
  ― Rumi
• “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” ― Rumi
• “Knock, And He’ll open the door
  Vanish, And He’ll make you shine like the sun
  Fall, And He’ll raise you to the heavens
  Become nothing, And He’ll turn you into everything.” ― Jalal Ad-Din Rumi
• “When I am with you, we stay up all night.
  When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.
  Praise God for those two insomnias!
  And the difference between them.” ― Rumi
• “Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” ― Rumi
• “My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.” ― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
• “I want to see you.
• Know your voice.
• Recognize you when you
  first, come ’round the corner.
• Sense your scent when I come
  into a room, you’ve just left.
• Know the lift of your heel,
  the glide of your foot.
• Become familiar with the way
  you purse your lips
  then let them part,
  just the slightest bit,
  when I lean in to your space
  and kiss you.
• I want to know the joy
  of how you whisper “more” ― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
• “silence is the language of god,
  all else is poor translation.” ― Rumi
• “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” ― Rumi, Masnavi i Man’avi, the spiritual couplets of Maula
• “Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.” ― Rumi Jalaluddin-Din
• “In your light, I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.” ― Rumi
• “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.” ― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
• “لا تجزع من جرحك، وإلا فكيف للنور أن يتسلل إلى باطنك؟”  ― جلال الدين الرومي
• “Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.” ― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
• “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.” ― Rumi
  tags: inspirational
• “Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.” ― Rumi
• “I want to sing like the bird’s sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.” ― Rumi
• “Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.” ― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

Top 10 Rumi Poems About Love, Life

Poem #1
Love came and became like blood in my body.
It rushed through my veins and encircled my heart.

Poem #2
I will be waiting here…
For your silence to break,
for your soul to shake,
for your love to wake.

Poem #3
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.

Poem #4
I choose to love you in silence, for in silence I find no rejection.
I choose to love you in loneliness, for in loneliness no one owns you but me.
I choose to adore you from a distance. For distance will shield me from pain.
I choose to kiss you in the wind, for the wind is gentler than my lips.
I choose to hold you in my dreams, for me in dreams, you have no ends.

Poem #5
I have lived on the lip of insanity,
wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door.
It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside.

Poem #6
I’ve been looking for a long, long time,
for this thing called love,
I’ve ridden comets across the sky,
and I’ve looked below and above.
Then one day I looked inside myself,
and this is what I found,
a golden sun residing there,
beaming forth God’s light and sound.

Poem #7
I am so close, I may look distant.
So completely mixed with you, I may look separate.
So out in the open, I appear hidden.
So silent, because I am constantly talking with you.

Poem #8
I was a tiny bug.
Now a mountain.
I was left behind.
Now honoured at the head.
You healed my wounded hunger and anger,
and made me a poet who sings about joy.

Poem #9
Sometimes in order to help He makes us cry.
Happy the eye that sheds tears for His sake.
Fortunate the heart that burns for His sake.
Laughter always follows tears.
Blessed are those who understand.
Life blossoms wherever water flows.
Where tears are shed divine mercy is shown

Poem #10
Doing as others told me, I was blind.
Coming when others called me, I was lost.
Then I left everyone, myself as well.
Then I found everyone, myself as well.

Bonus Poem #11
This is how it always is when I finish a poem.
A great silence overcomes me
and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.