Rumi’s top 10 quotes

CAIRO – 20 December 2017: The death anniversary for the great Persian poet Rumi was several days ago, on December 17. Egypt Today looks at his life and some of his best quotes.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī was a 13th century Persian poet, Islamic scholar and mystic of Sufism who was born in 1207 in what is now Afghanistan. Primarily writing in Persian, he also wrote in several other languages, including Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, and he lived primarily in Konya, a city of the Ottoman Empire.

His works profoundly transformed Persian literature and he greatly influenced the culture of where he lived. To this day he is hailed as a cultural icon with various different peoples, such as the Afghans, Iranians and the Turks, claiming that he belongs to them.

With his immense popularity even outside the Arab world – being called the best selling poet in the U.S. – it’s fair to say that Rumi belongs to all of mankind. Here are 10 of his quotes, exemplifying his romantic grasp of language.

1- “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.”

2- “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”

3- “The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”

4- “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

5- “You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”


6- “I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.”

7- “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”


8- “With life as short as a half taken breath, don’t plant anything but love.”

9- “My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”


10- “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”