A Collection of Rumi: Quotes and Poetry

by Alayna Miller

“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

“What you seek is seeking you.” ― Rumi

“Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.” ― Rumi

“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.” ― Rumi

“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.” ― Rumi

“Here is a relationship booster that is guaranteed to work: Every time your spouse or lover says something stupid make your eyes light up as if you just heard something brilliant.” ― Rumi

“When someone is counting out gold for you, don't look at your hands, or the gold. Look at the giver.” ― Rumi

“The lion is most handsome when looking for food.” ― Rumi

“Love comes with a knife, not some shy question, and not with fears for its reputation!” ― Rumi

“Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.” ― Rumi

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be.

Two Kinds of Intelligence There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences. With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets. There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,

and it doesn't move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.