Rumi, the Sufi mystic is one of the best-selling poets in the US, and his works have been translated into more than 23 languages.
For Afghans, who learn his poems in primary school, Rumi is “Maulana Jalaludin Balkh”, or “Maulana” (literally “our master”), or simply “Balkhi”.
The young Rumi and his family fled to Turkey, where he spent most of his life – he died in the city of Konya in 1273. It was there that his son founded the Order of the Whirling Dervishes to perpetuate his father’s teachings.
1. “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
2. 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.
3. “Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.”
4. “Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
5. “This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.”
6. “Dancing is not just getting up painlessly, like a leaf blown on the wind; dancing is when you tear your heart out and rise out of your body to hang suspended between the worlds.”
7. “Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.”
8. “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
9. “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
10. “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
