When your love contracts in anger, the atmosphere itself feels threatening. But when you’re expansive, no matter what the weather, you’re in an open, windy field with friends. – Rumi
Water the fruit trees and don’t water the thorns. – Rumi
Purify your eyes, and see the pure world. Your life will fill with radiant forms. – Rumi
How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you’re always flying off to blue perfection? – Rumi
Where will you plant your grief-seeds? We need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire. – Rumi
If all you can do is crawl, start crawling. – Rumi
Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover, and then are taken off. That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath, is the sweetness that comes after grief. – Rumi
Let yourself become living poetry. – Rumi
Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar. Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where you go on the street, the street where everyone says, “How are you?” and no one says How aren’t you? – Rumi
There is a fountain inside you. Don’t walk around with an empty bucket. – Rumi
Is what I say true? Say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe. – Rumi
You are a fountain of the sun’s light. I am a willow shadow on the ground. You make my raggedness silky. – Rumi
You fill yourself with the sharp pain of love, rather than its fulfillment. – Rumi
I do not know who lives here in my chest, or why the smile comes. I am not myself, more the bare green knob of a rose that lost every leaf and petal to the morning wind. – Rumi
Something opens our wings, something makes boredom and hurt disappear. – Rumi
Inside of us, there’s a continual autumn. Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water. – Rumi
If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring. – Rumi
This love is the rose that blooms forever. – Rumi
Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking. – Rumi
All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light. – Rumi
