Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.

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.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

A vow is a snare for sin.

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.

Of all debts men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their moneys worth, except for these.

How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

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

I am the flame, electric blue, lightening, razor-like, renewing my spirit. Heart beating in time to the earth’s rhythm and expanse of black ink sky, overreaching eternal. My fingertips spark with seeds of creation, fireworks coloring canvas, beckoned by this light that lifts me.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.