Essential Rumi Quotes

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

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

Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“When you go through a hard period,
When everything seems to oppose you,
... When you feel you cannot even bear one more minute,
NEVER GIVE UP!
Because it is the time and place that the course will divert!”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be. ”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Drum sound rises on the air, its throb, my heart.

A voice inside the beat says, "I know you're tired, but come. This is the way.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“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, Essential Rumi

“These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon;
How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“You are so weak. Give up to grace.
The ocean takes care of each wave till it gets to shore.
You need more help than you know.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“Don't try to steer the boat.
Don't open shop for yourself. Listen. Keep silent.
You are not God's mouthpiece. Try to be an ear,
And if you do speak, ask for explanations.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“You have forgotten the One
who doesn't care about ownership,
who doesn't try to turn a profit
from every human exchange.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“What matters is how quickly you do what your soul directs.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“The same wind that uproots trees
makes the grass shine.

The lordly wind loves the weakness
and the lowness of grasses.
Never brag of being strong.

The axe doesn't worry how thick the branches are.
It cuts them to pieces. But not the leaves.
It leaves the leaves alone.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“You're water. We're the millstone.
You're wind. We're dust blown up into shapes.
You're spirit. We're the opening and closing
of our hands. You're the clarity.
We're the language that tries to say it.
You're joy. We're all the different kinds of laughing.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“There are thousands of wines
that can take over our minds.

Don't think all ecstasies
are the same!

Jesus was lost in his love for God.
His donkey was drunk with barley.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“Whoever's calm and sensible is insane!”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Knowledge that is acquired
is not like this. Those who have it worry if
audiences like it or not.
It's a bait for popularity.
Disputational knowing wants customers.
It has no soul...
The only real customer is God.
Chew quietly
your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay
playfully childish.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“I don't want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music, and this dawn, and the warmth of your cheek against mine.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, yet you go door to door asking for crusts.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Without the frown of clouds and lightning, the vines would be burned by the smiling sun.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Brother, stand the pain.
Escape the poison of your impulses.
The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do.
Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun.
Turn away from the cave of your sleeping.
That way a thorn expands to a rose.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this joy to anyone?

Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“There's no one with intelligence in this town except that man over there playing with the children, the one riding the stick horse. He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child's play.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi

“Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”
― Rumi, Essential Rumi