Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure. – Rumi
Across time, place, and culture, Rumi’s poems articulate what it feels like to be alive, and they help us understand our own search for love and the ecstatic in the coil of daily life. – Lee Briccetti
Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn’t know you needed transforming. – Jerry Stahl
[The] combination of mystical richness and bold adaptations of poetic forms is the key to [Rumi’s] popularity… – Jawid Mojaddedi
Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person. – Robert Bly
[Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity… like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral… – Coleman Barks
Ramana Maharshi and Rumi would agree: the joy of being human is in uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin. – Coleman Barks
[Rumi’s words are an] expression of praise and grief and gratitude and play. – Coleman Barks
If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable. – Huston Smith
