Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (Persian Muslim Mystic)

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

Everything in the universe is a pitcher brimming with wisdom and beauty.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Wisdom, Beauty, Learning

The intelligent want self-control; children want candy.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Action

No mirror ever became iron again; No bread ever became wheat; No ripened grape ever became sour fruit. Mature yourself and be secure from a change for the worse. Become the light.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Growth, Courage

Stay with friends who support you in these. Talk with them about sacred texts, and how you are doing, and how they are doing, and keep your practices together.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Support, Friend, Friendship, Love

Don’t allow your animal nature to rule your reason.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Wisdom, Desire

Be occupied, then, with what you really value and let the thief take something else.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Focus, Action

We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.
—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

If you want money more than anything, You’ll be bought and sold. If you have a greed for food, you’ll be a loaf of bread. This is a subtle truth: whatever you love, you are.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

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

Who could be so lucky? Who comes to a lake for water and sees the reflection of moon.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

People of the world don’t look at themselves, and so they blame one another.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: People, Reflection

Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah did. It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Do not sit long with a sad friend. When you go to a garden do you look at the weeds? Spend more time with the roses and jasmines.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Pessimism, Cynicism

one cannot lodge in if.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Action

Let’s ask God to help us to self-control for one who lacks it, lacks his grace.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Action, God

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

My friend, the sufi is the friend of the present moment. To say tomorrow is not our way.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Action, Friend

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Regard a king as someone unconcerned with kingship.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Teach, Love

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: Wisdom, Habit, Desire

Travelers, it is late. Life’s sun is going to set. During these brief days that you have strength, be quick and spare no effort of your wings.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Effort, Life, Action, Win

Knowledge is light; avarice ice.
Knowledge is water; this world dirt.
A trickle of wisdom appears from beyond
to check the vices of this world.
Should the trickle become abundant,
none would endure, be it virtue or vice.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you … this turning toward what you deeply love saves you.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Everyone is so afraid of death, but the real sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Death, Wisdom

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

During sleep the spirit is set free. Behold how it rejoices in the place (of freedom). The wicked is delivered from his wickedness; the prisoner escapes the sorrow of his confinement. The world appears wide, but in truth is very narrow. Its laughter lamentation, its glory shame.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

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: Earth, Courage, Fear

Since in order to speak, one must first listen, learn to speak by listening.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Topics: Love, Communication

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

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *