A Year with Rumi Quotes

“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.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

“You left ground and sky weeping,
mind and soul full of grief.

No one can take your place in existence,
or in absence. Both mourn, the angels, the prophets,
and this sadness I feel has taken from me
the taste of language, so that I cannot say
the flavor of my being apart.”
― Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

“Some Hindus have an elephant to show.
No one here has ever seen an elephant.
They bring it at night to a dark room.

One by one, we go in the dark and come out
saying how we experience the animal.
One of us happens to touch the trunk.
A water-pipe kind of creature.

Another, the ear. A strong, always moving
back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg.
I find it still, like a column on a temple.

Another touches the curve back.
A leathery throne. Another, the cleverest,
feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain.
He is proud of his description.

Each of us touches one place
and understands the whole in that way.
The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark
are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.

If each of us held a candle there,
and if we went in together, we could see it.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

“every experience will fill with immediacy. Because I love this, I am never bored. Beauty constantly wells up like the noise of springwater in my ear. Tree limbs rise and fall like ecstatic arms. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors. The green felt cover slips; we get a flash of the mirror underneath. The conventional opinion of this poetry is that it shows great optimism for the future. But Father Reason says, No need to announce the future. This now is it. Your deepest need and desire is satisfied by this moment’s energy here in your hand.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“When a bird gets free, it does not go back for remnants left on the bottom of the cage.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“If you want money more than anything,
you will be bought and sold.

If you have a greed for food,
you will become a loaf of bread.

This is a subtle truth.
Whatever you love, you are.”
― Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

“Sometimes I Do 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, A Year With Rumi

“We are the the night ocean filled with glints of light. We are the space between the fish and the moon, while we sit here together.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“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, A Year With Rumi

“Every part of you has a secret language. Your hands and your feet say what you have done. Every need brings in what’s needed. Pain bears its cure like a child.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Most people guard against going into the fire and so end up in it. Those who love the water of pleasure and make it their devotion are cheated with this reversal. The trickery goes further. The voice of the fire tells the truth, sayin I am not fire. I am fountainhead. Come into me and don’t mind the sparks. If you are a friend of the presence, fire is your water.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Love flows down. The ground submits to the sky and suffers what comes. Is the ground worse for giving in like that? Do not put blankets over the drum. Open completely. Let your spirit ear listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Half-Heartedness Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being. If not, leave this gathering. Half-heartedness does not reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“I love this world, even as I hear the great wind of leaving it rising, for there is a grainy taste I prefer to every idea of heaven: human friendship.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“You make my dance daring enough to finish. No more timidity. Let fruit fall, and wind turn my roots up in the air, done with patient waiting.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Words are ways we add up breath, counting stress and syllable with our exacting musical knack that takes us farther and farther from zero.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Your deepest need and desire is satisfied by this moment’s energy here in your hand.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Traveling is as refreshing for some as staying at home is for others.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It is a total waking-up.

(from Buoyancy)”
― Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

“On the Day I Die On the day I die, when I am being carried toward the grave, don’t weep. Don’t say, He’s gone. He’s gone. Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets and the moon sets, but they’re not gone. Death is a coming together. The tomb looks like a prison, but it’s really release into union. The human seed goes down into the ground like a bucket into the well where Joseph is. It grows and comes up full of some unimagined beauty. Your mouth closes here and immediately opens with a shout of joy there.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“There is 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 comes. But if brain and belly are burning clean with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire. The fog clears and new energy makes you run up the steps in front of you. Be emptier, and cry like reed instruments cry. Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen. When you are full of food and drink, an ugly metal statue sits where your spirit should. When you fast, good habits gather like friends who want to help. Fasting is Solomon’s ring. Don’t give it to some illusion and lose your power, but even if you have, if you have lost all will and control, they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing out of the ground, pennants flying above them. A table descends to your tents, Jesus’ table. Expect to see it when you fast, this table spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Listen to presences inside poems.
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises.”
― Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

“My guide, my soul, your only sadness
is when I am not walking with you.”
― Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

“When school and mosque and minaret get torn down, then dervishes can begin their community. Not until faithfulness turns to betrayal and betrayal into trust can any human being become part of the truth.”
― Rumi, A Year With 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.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It is a total waking-up.”
― Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

“But there are those in bodies who are pure soul. It can happen. These messengers invite us to walk with them. They say, You may feel happy enough where you are, but we cannot do without you any longer. Please. So we walk”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands, or your own genuine solitude? Freedom, or power over an entire nation? A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi

“You are the source of my life. You bring rivers from the mountain springs. You brighten my eyes. The wine you offer takes me out of myself into the self we share. Doing that is religion.”
― Rumi, A Year With Rumi