Quotes from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“She loved him so much she concealed his name in many phrases, the inner meanings known only to her.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“You had better run from me. My words are fire.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Where the lips are silent the heart has a thousand tongues.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“If you want to be more alive, love is the truest health.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“People who repress desires
often turn, suddenly,
into hypocrites.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Love is an open secret, the most obvious thing in the world and the most hidden, with no why to how it keeps its mystery.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“A servant wants to be rewarded for what he does. A lover wants only to be in love's presence, that ocean whose depth will never be known.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“There is little one can say about love. It has to be lived, and it's always in motion.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Someone who does not run toward the allure of love walks a road where nothing lives.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“You could string a hundred endless days together,
My soul would find no comfort from this pain.
You laugh at my tale? You may be educated
But you haven’t learned to love till you’re insane”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“A pen went scribbling along. When it tried to write love, it broke.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“This is what love does and continues to do. It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“IGNORANCE

I didn’t know love would make me this
crazy, with my eyes
like the river Ceyhun
carrying me in its rapids
out to sea,where every bit
of shattered boat
sinks to the bottom.

An alligator lifts its head and swallows
the ocean, then the ocean
floor becomes
a desert covering
the alligator in
sand drifts.

Changes do
happen. I do not know how,
or what remains of what
has disappeared
into the absolute.

I hear so many stories
and explanations, but I keep quiet,
because I don’t know anything,
and because something I swallowed
in the ocean
has made me completely content
with ignorance.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“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.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“The feelings trembled and flapped in his chest like a bird newly put in a cage.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“THIS TORTURE

Why should we tell you our love stories
when you spill them together like blood in the dirt?

Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor,
or a fire we can’t see,

but how does saying that
push us through the top of the head into
the light above the head?

Love is not
an iron pot, so this boiling energy
won’t help.

Soul, heart, self.
Beyond and within those
is one saying,

How long before I’m free of this torture!”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“From "Blasphemy and the Core"

Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances.
That's not for human beings. Move within,
but don't move the way fear makes you move.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Let soul speak with the silent articulation of a face.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Are you jealous of the ocean's generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this love to anyone?

Fish don't hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim in the huge, fluid freedom.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“First, when I was apart from you,
this world did not exist, nor any other.

Second, whatever I was looking for
was always you.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“They fell to, on the ground. You’ve seen a baker
rolling dough. He kneads it gently at first,
then more roughly. He pounds it on the board.
It softly groans under his palms.

Now he spreads
it out and rolls it flat. Then he bunches it,
and rolls it all the way out again,

thin.
Now he adds water and mixes it well.

Now salt,
and a little more salt. Now he shapes itdelicately to its final shape and slides itinto the oven, which is already hot.
You remember breadmaking!

This is how your desire
tangles with a desired one.

And it’s not justa metaphor for a man and a woman making love.
Warriors in battle do this too.

A great mutual embrace
is always happening between the eternal
and what dies, between essence and accident.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Lovers move like lightning and wind.
No contest.
Theologians mumble, rumble-dumble, necessity and free will, while lover and beloved
pull themselves into each other.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Your faces are very beautiful,
but they are wooden cages.

You had better run from me.
My words are fire.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“You’ve so distracted me, your absence fans my love. Don’t ask how. Then you come near. “Do not…” I say, and “Do not…,” you answer. Don’t ask why this delights me.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“I Have Vanished In the early morning, A lover asked her beloved, “Do you love me more than yourself?” “More than myself? For sure I have no self any more— I am you already. The ‘I’ has gone; the ‘you’ has come about. Even my identity is gone. The answer is taken for granted. ‘You and I’ has no meaning. The ‘I’ has vanished like a drop into an ocean of honey.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Love is a madman,

working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes,
running through the mountains, drinking poison,
and now quietly choosing annihilation.”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“What sort of person says that he or she wants to be polished and pure, then complains about being handled roughly?”
― Rumi, quote from The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

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