Rumi

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

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.

When setting out on a journey, do not seek advice from those who have never left home.

Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

Doing as others told me, I was blind. Coming when others called me, I was lost. Then I left everyone, myself as well. Then I found myself, myself as well.

The pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one’s clothes.

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

There is in the act of preparing, the moment you start caring.

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.