Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī (1207–73,) better known as Rūmī, was a Persian poet and Sūfī mystic. He is often referred to as Mevlānā, meaning “Our Guide.”
Rūmī was born north of the Amu Darya (Oxus) River, in Persian-speaking Tajikistan or Afghanistan, from where Rūmī’s family fled a Mongol annexation. They settled in Konya, then the capital city of the Seljuk Empire, now in Turkey. Rūmī’s father was a practicing mystic who preached to devout disciples in Persian.
Rūmī was sent to study in the highly regarded Arabic-speaking madrasa schools of Damascus and Aleppo and returned to Konya in his thirties to take on his late father’s position as an Islāmic cleric and legal scholar.
Rūmī remained in Konya for the rest of his life. He founded the Mevlevi Sūfī order, which survives to this day. His followers, the whirling dervishes, lose themselves in trance and dance, occasionally spinning like tops for hours on end. Rūmī’s great poetic works are the Masnavi or “spiritual couplets” and the Divan, a compendium of thousands of lyric poems.
Rūmī is respected as an icon not only of the Islāmic civilization (or of Afghan, Iranian, Tajik, or Turkish heritage,) but also of the global culture. Rūmī’s poetry and religious writings are among the most beloved and respected in Islām and elsewhere. The Mevlāna Museum in Konya, consisting of Rūmī’s mausoleum and the dervish lodge (Dergah,) is Turkey’s second most-visited tourist attraction after Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Regard a king as someone unconcerned with kingship.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Love, Teach
Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave ’til it gets to shore. You need more help than you know.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
When the remedy you have offered only increases the disease, then leave him who will not be cured, and tell your story to someone who seeks the truth.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Teach, Truth, Love
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Love
Brother stand the pain;Escape the poison of your impulses.The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do.Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun.Turn away from the cave of your sleeping.That way a thorn expands to a rose.A particular glows with the universal.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Beauty, Courage, Growth
Birdsong brings relief to my longing. I am just as ecstatic as they are, but with nothing to say! Please, universal soul, practice some song, or something, through me.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Be like melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
You’re water. We’re the millstone. You’re wind. We’re dust blown up into shapes. You’re spirit. We’re the opening and closing of our hands. You’re the clarity. We’re the language that tries to say it. You’re joy. We’re all the different kinds of laughing.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Be occupied, then, with what you really value and let the thief take something else.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Action, Focus
You have forgotten the One
who doesn’t care about ownership,
who doesn’t try to turn a profit
from every human exchange.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
It is God’s kindness to terrify you in order to lead you to safety.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Fear, Kindness, God, Courage
Revile those who flatter you.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Courage
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
O, happy the soul that saw its own faults.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Happy, Reflection
I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
The rain-weeping and the sun burning twine together to make us grow. Keep your intelligence white-hot and your grief glistening, so your life will stay fresh. Cry easily like a little child.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Win, Growth, Courage, Life
Paradise is surrounded by what we dislike; the fires of hell are surrounded by what we desire.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Desire, Wisdom
Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Challenges, Courage
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
You think the shadow is the substance.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Truth, Wisdom
Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah did. It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
The beginning of pride and hatred lies in worldly desire, and the strength of your desire if from habit. When an evil tendency becomes confirmed by habit, rage is triggered when anyone restrains you.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Habit, Wisdom, Desire
At every instant and from every side, resounds the call of Love: We are going to sky, who wants to come with us?
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
If your knowledge of fire has been turned to certainty by words alone, then seek to be cooked by the fire itself. Don’t abide in borrowed certainty. There is no real certainty until you burn; if you wish for this, sit down in the fire.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Courage, Knowledge, Growth
Everything in the universe is a pitcher brimming with wisdom and beauty.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Learning, Wisdom, Beauty
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Beware! Don’t allow yourself to do what you know is wrong, relying on the thought, Later I will repent and ask God’s forgiveness.’
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: God, Action
Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Courage
On the way there is no harder pass than this: fortunate is he who does not carry envy as a companion.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Wisdom, Character
There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.
You feel it, don’t you?
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
The same wind that uproots trees
makes the grass shine.
The lordly wind loves the weakness
and the lowness of grasses.
Never brag of being strong.
The axe doesn’t worry how thick the branches are.
It cuts them to pieces. But not the leaves.
It leaves the leaves alone.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Fasting is the first principle of medicine.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Energy
When your heart becomes the grave of your secrets, that desire of yours will be gained more quickly. The prophet said that anyone who keeps secret his inmost thought will soon attain the object of his desire. When seeds are buried in the earth, their inward secrets become the flourishing garden.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Fear, Courage, Earth
This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
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