Who better than Rumi to narrate on spirituality and reflection?
Here are some of our favorite quotes from the revered 13th-century Sufi poet:
Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings… Leave and don’t look away from the sun as you go, in whose light you’re sometimes crescent, sometimes full.
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. A particular glows with the universal.
Fasting is the first principle of medicine.
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be shortsighted as to not able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never runs out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.
I am iron resisting the most enormous magnet there is.
Let nothing be inside of you.
Be empty: Give your lips to the lips of the reed.
When like a reed you fill with His breath,
then you’ll taste sweetness.
When the brain and the belly burn from fasting, every moment a new song rises out of the fire. The mists clear, and a new vitality makes you spring up the steps before you.
To change, a person must face the dragon of his appetites with another dragon, the life-energy of the soul.
Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.
Let the beauty we love become the good we do.
Before death takes away what you are given, give away what there is to give.
Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.
When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?
Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and attend them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
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.
Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure.
Come, come, whoever you are
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving
It doesn’t matter
Ours is not a caravan of despair
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come
Now is the time to unite the soul and the world. Now is the time to see the sunlight dancing as one with the shadows.
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