Rumi

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.

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

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

You show your worth by what you seek! – Rumi

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

The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

Man is not weak; knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.