Rumi

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

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

Although the road is never ending, take a step and keep walking, do not look fearfully into the distance…on the path let the heart be your guide for the body is hesitant and full of fear.

Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

Thus, by every device from the stick to the carrot, the emaciated Austrian donkey is made to pull the Nazi barrow up an ever-steepening hill.

I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colors. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

Sometimes if I see negative things it really doesn’t faze me, because you’ve got to be tough and you’ve got to be you.

Lilac anemone, paper petals, turning tentatively to face a pale sun opening to reveal a lightness of being, a flash of gold, a fresh resilience, contented silence, the dawn of a new day.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence – neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish – it is an imponderably valuable gift.