Rumi

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.

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.

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

Woman is a ray of God. She is not that earthly beloved: she is creative, not created.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.

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

Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.

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

Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Be humble. It becomes a creature, a depending and borrowed being, that lives not of itself, but breathes in another’s air with another’s breath, and is accountable for every moment of time and can call nothing its own, but is absolutely a tenant at will of the great Lord of heaven and earth.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else… you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

What you can’t pay back you pay forward.

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.