The Essential Rumi

Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.

Be empty of worrying.Think of who created thought!Why do you stay in prisonWhen the door is so wide open?

Be melting snow.Wash yourself of yourself.

Respond to every call that excites your spirit.

When you go through a hard period,When everything seems to oppose you,... When you feel you cannot even bear one more minute,NEVER GIVE UP!Because it is the time and place that the course will divert!

These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites so that you will have two wings to fly, not one

Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon;How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be.

There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope.The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

I will be waiting here....For your silence to break,For your soul to shake,For your love to wake!

You are so weak. Give up to grace.The ocean takes care of each wave till it gets to shore.You need more help than you know.

What matters is how quickly you do what your soul directs.

Drum sound rises on the air, its throb, my heart. A voice inside the beat says, "I know you're tired, but come. This is the way.

Whoever's calm and sensible is insane!

Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame
 and dignity. You are God's lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.

I don't want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music, and this dawn, and the warmth of your cheek against mine.

Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being. If not, leave this gathering. Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty.

Don't try to steer the boat. Don't open shop for yourself. Listen. Keep silent. You are not God's mouthpiece. Try to be an ear, And if you do speak, ask for explanations.

You have forgotten the Onewho doesn't care about ownership,who doesn't try to turn a profitfrom every human exchange.

There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, yet you go door to door asking for crusts.

The same wind that uproots treesmakes the grass shine.The lordly wind loves the weaknessand 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.

There are thousands of winesthat can take over our minds.Don't think all ecstasiesare the same!Jesus was lost in his love for God.His donkey was drunk with barley.

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.

There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope.

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.

There's no one with intelligence in this town except that man over there playing with the children, the one riding the stick horse. He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child's play.

When I am with you, we stay up all night.When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.Praise God for these two insomnias!And the difference between them.The minute I heard my first love storyI started looking for you, not knowinghow blind that was.Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.They're in each other all along.We are the mirror as well as the face in it.We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are painand what cures pain, both. We arethe sweet cold water and the jar that pours.I want to hold you close like a lute,so we can cry out with loving.You would rather throw stones at a mirror?I am your mirror, and here are the stones.

Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?Why would you refuse to givethis joy to anyone?Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!They swim the huge fluid freedom.