Rumi
Rumi
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, Mawlānā/Mevlânâ, Mevlevî/Mawlawī, and more popularly simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. Rumi's influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions: Iranians, Tajiks, Turks, Greeks, Pashtuns, other Central Asian Muslims, and the Muslims of South Asia have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 September 1207
Even when tied in a thousand knots, the string is still but one.
That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquillity.
Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.
This is what love does and continues to do. It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.
I closed my mouth and spoke to you in a hundred silent ways.
With passion pray. With passion make love. With passion eat and drink and dance and play. Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God?
I see my beauty in you.
Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world.
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.
The waterwheel accepts water and turns and gives it away, weeping.
I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as an animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
Don't make the body do what the spirit does best, and don't put a big load on the spirit that the body could easily carry.
Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.