Rumi Poetry Quotes

Somewhere along the way, there develops within the soul a yearning that can no longer be ignored, a craving for the great love affair. We feel it drawing ever closer. It is the greatest of them all. It cannot fail. It is all consuming. It is incomparable. It is the love affair with our own true nature and the source from which it comes. The desire is in all of us but, more often than not, it is ignored for other interests. We wrestle with each interest, trying to make it work, growing with each adventure until the light has grown bright enough for us to reach for it. ~ Donna Goddard

Billions of stars will lose it's fuel from the brightness of the only face, the guest of your heart,
The beauty of your soul. ~ Bzam

Don't flounder in the preambles of the past
Wounded with regrets; don't let autumnal
Nostalgia blind you to the sounds and scents
Of the present's Spring; you're a native of
The pellucid moment, make it infinite beyond
The curving snake of passing time and space.
Learn to die in the infinitely elusive moment. ~ Rumi

Your flesh is the burden of your being,
Seek the soul that wears it,
So that you may receive
Mercy. ~ Bzam

On the path of Love we are neither masters nor the owners of our lives. We are only a brush in the hand of the Master Painter. ~ Rumi

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you. ~ Rumi

There's a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

From Essential Rumi
by Coleman Barks ~ Mesnevi

Love is like a gold mine,
The deeper you dig in your heart, the more love you receive. ~ Bzam

Even your graffiti artists spray Rumi on the walls ~ Khaled Hosseini

He remembers a verse from the mystic poet, Rumi, Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. ~ J.J. Brown

Making true love is not about feeling the skin,
It's about feeling the soul without touching. ~ Bzam

Water the fruit trees, and don't water the thorns. Be generous to what nurtures the spirit and God's luminous reason-light. Don't honor what causes dysentry and knotted up tumors. ~ Coleman Barks

You think of yourself
as a citizen of the universe.
You think you belong
to this world of dust and matter.
Out of this dust
you have created a personal image,
and have forgotten
about the essence of your true origin ~ Rumi

Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript oƒ a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you.
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that. ~ Rumi

Woman is the light of God. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

It is in the vision of the physical eyes
That no invisible or secret thing exists.
But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God
What thing could remain hidden under such Light? ~ Meghan Nuttall Sayres

I am not a soldier of Poetry,
My fight is with the barriers off my inner self,
I am the soldier of Love. ~ Bzam

Never lose hope, my heart, miracles dwell in the invisible. If the whole world turns against you keep your eyes on the Friend. ~ Rumi

There is a loneliness more precious than life. There is a freedom more precious than the world. Infinitely more precious than life and the world is that moment when one is alone with God. ~ Rumi

Emotions bleed where love frowns and despair smiles
My home is within the core
The center of this place, it lays down my heart for love
My love's (in) the Center of War ~ Criss Jami

There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, rather than as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if - as the poet Rumi put it - everything is rigged in our favor. ~ Arianna Huffington

I got you a present."
"Did you?"
"It's a book of poetry
romancy stuff. I thought, 'How schmaltzy is that,' so it seemed like the thing. Then I screwed up and left it in my desk at work ~ J.D. Robb

I mostly hope you think I miss you and in the end you hope you'll get me, but that's fantasy, untrue as you, and bitter as the hope you left me. ~ Phar West Nagle

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. ~ Seamus Heaney

*Okay, you make eating hos sound pretty. talk poetry to me, writer boy.* ~ Christopher Moore

He said that he felt that there was a book hidden between us. Some small thing lodged between a rib or a summer. and He wanted to find it. ~ Mikl Paul

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. ~ Howard Nemerov

The fundamentalist believer is mostly a weird intellectual who often lacks real faith altogether. As a self-appointed attorney for God, who is in no need of attorneys, he very easily turns out to be more godless than the agnostic and the unbeliever. At all events, he seems deaf to poetry. ~ Steve Allen

If I stay close to the sea, I will go on well. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue. ~ William Cowper

Like A Hanged Pitcher
Like a hanged pitcher,
No drink is pouring off me
It's natural to get numbed gradually.

Pig-headed seashells!
This boasting sky,
Is an anchor
which has fallen on my lap
This dizzy sky!
The moon's been cleared
A shadow's coming after me
Barefooted on my dreams
You used to run!

Enjoyed?!
Numb!

All my veins are connected to this land...

Like a hanged pitcher
Joyful of this sky
One day a huge whale swallowed it as a whole.

And it was over!
The Gulf was over!
You waved hands.

Like a hanged pitcher,
It's simple!
I lost the game
And gambled away...

(TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN TO ENGLISH BY ROSA JAMALI) ~ Rosa Jamali

If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats. ~ Robert Lynd

If you put your soul against the oar with me, the power that made the universe will enter your sinew from a source not outside of your limbs, but from a holy realm that lives within us. ~ Rumi

Proper names are poetry in the raw.
Like all poetry they are untranslatable. ~ W. H. Auden

No misery
ever so beautiful
than the one
this mind creates. ~ Vivid Darkness

I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry. ~ James Tate

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It was the furthest thing in the world from the rosy-fingered dawn of poetry and old Technicolor movies; this was an anti-dawn, damp and as pale as the cheek of a day-old corpse. ~ Stephen King

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. ~ Walter Pater

Listen my love, illumination is eternal. Now is always evolving. As there are billions of stars, there are billions of steps. As there are billions of souls, there are billions of ways to grow. ~ Rumi

Bridge burned from end to end,
and I don't miss you anymore.
You delivered silence
I've birthed freedom. ~ Jessica Kristie

Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time. ~ Martin Amis

It is natural to speak of hymns as "poems," indiscriminately, for they have the same structure. But a hymn is not necessarily a poem, while a poem that can be sung as a hymn is something more than a poem. Imagination makes poems; devotion makes hymns. There can be poetry without emotion, but a hymn never. A poem may argue; a hymn must not. In short to be a hymn, what is written must express spiritual feelings and desires. The music of faith, hope and charity will be somewhere in its strain. ~ Hezekiah Butterworth

funny how our hearts
were designed
to love
so fiercely.

but break
ever so gently. ~ Sanober Khan

When my pillow would no longer be wet,
when I won't curl up, cursing my fate,
maybe then I'll fly, feel alive again
then somehow maybe I'll get rid of this pain. ~ Anangsha Alammyan

If you can change the way you think in time you will notice a change in your heart and also a change in your life and the way you see things. ~ The Prolific Penman

Forget the future. I'd worship someone who could do that. ~ Rumi

I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn't accept? ~ Dejan Stojanovic

This world's existence is one night long. There's a great lively gathering that night, but some people sleep through it. ~ Rumi

the rain that held the light
that fell, the rain that fell,
the light that held ~ Anne Michaels

Look, moon
I turned silver for you. ~ Sanober Khan