Quotes from Rumi

Let yourself become living poetry.

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.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep.

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?

This is how I would die into the love I have for you: as pieces of cloud dissolve in sunlight.

How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you're always flying off to blue perfection?

That hurt we embrace becomes joy. Call it to your arms where it can change.

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.

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.

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.

Why should I stay at the bottom of a well, when a strong rope is in my hand?

Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches you by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly — not one.

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.

If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring.

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!

Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.

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.

The cure for pain is in the pain.

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.

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.

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

Is what I say true? Say yes quickly, if you know, if you've known it from before the beginning of the universe.

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?