Rumi

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

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

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.

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.

Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.

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

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as ‘making a life’.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.

Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.

If a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. If he says perhaps he means no. And if he says no, he’s the hell of a diplomat.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is to prepare for the long haul, the rise and fall, and let neither define your sense of self.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

It’s not burn baby burn, but learn, baby, learn, so that you can earn, baby, earn.