A library of wisdom
Sufism — Quotes
Rumi is the bestselling poet in America. Hafiz is quoted at weddings and on coffee mugs. Yet almost no one in the West has practiced what they were writing about. Sufism — the myst A curated set of 30 quotes from the Sufism tradition.
“You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?”
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
“What you seek is seeking you.”
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
“Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.”
“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.”
“I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I have been knocking from the inside.”
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
“Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.”
“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.”
“Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, "You owe me." Look what happens with a love like that — it lights the whole sky.”
“The small man builds cages for everyone he knows. While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful, rowdy prisoners.”
“A poet is someone who can pour Light into a cup, then raise it to nourish your beautiful parched, holy mouth.”
“When the heart grieves for what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has found.”
“The Seven Valleys of the soul are seven, and the journey through them is the work of a lifetime: Quest, Love, Knowledge, Independence, Unity, Bewilderment, Annihilation.”
“The drop becomes the ocean. The ocean is the drop.”
“They reached the Simorgh — and saw that the Simorgh was themselves.”
“All the prophets begin with the same word: come.”
“Whoever knows himself knows his Lord.”
“The Beloved is in your house, in your sleeve, in the mirror of your own face. The seeking is the not-finding.”
“My heart has opened to every form. It is a pasture for gazelles, a cloister for Christian monks, a temple for idols, a Kaaba for the pilgrim, the tablets of the Torah, the book of the Quran. Love is my religion.”
“There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth.”
“The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.”
“I love Thee with two loves — love for my own happiness, and perfect love, to love Thee as is Thy due.”
“O God, if I worship Thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not from me Thine eternal beauty.”
“Why are you so enchanted by this world, when a mine of gold lies within you?”
“The Sufi opens his hand to the universe and gives away each instant, free.”
“I am the Truth.”
“When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found.”