quotes by Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"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."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing 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."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?"
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?"
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din 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)

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din 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.
"
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din 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."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-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."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi (El Masnavi)

"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."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Sit, be still, and listen,
because you're drunk
and we're at
the edge of the roof."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Two there are who are never satisfied -- the lover of the world and the lover of knowledge."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi (El Masnavi)

"What you seek is seeking you."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi (Words of Paradise: Selected Poems of Rumi)

"That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Let Yourself Be Silently Drawn By the Stronger Pull Of That Which You Really Love."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Who could be so lucky? Who comes to a lake for water and sees the reflection of moon."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Beauty surrounds us."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of what you truly love."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Either give me more wine or leave me alone."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.
You feel it, don't you?"
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"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."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about… say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?"
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi (The Essential Rumi)

"A mountain keeps an echo deep inside. That's how I hold your voice."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"People want you to be happy.
Don't keep serving them your pain!

If you could untie your wings
and free your soul of jealousy,

you and everyone around you
would fly up like doves."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din 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."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you
Don't go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,
The door is round and open
Don't go back to sleep!"
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: For loving a true love.
Feet: To chase after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,
for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind
when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.
But when he finds his love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi (Night and Sleep)

"Reason is powerless in the expression of Love."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall and falling,
they're given wings."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Is it really so that the one I love is everywhere?"
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"In Silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi