Rumi

The quieter you become, you more you are able to hear.

If people misunderstand you, do not worry…it is your voice that they hear, but what goes through their mind is…their own thoughts.

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.

I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.

If you want the moon, do not hide from the night. If you want a rose, do not hide from the thorns. If you want love, do not hide from yourself.

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.

One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education and religion may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.

We mustn’t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.

You’ve got a big, big problem if you get caught up in what people say. If you’re gonna live for what people say, you might as well lay down and forget it. Because it doesn’t work that way.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

People ignore the thing they have the most power over. I know so many people who will go to a protest and do something big on an issue. But they won’t deal with that issue in their home.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.