Talk:Rumi

Come, come again

This quatrain is not by Rumi. It is by Abū-Sa'īd Abul-Khayr (967-1049). It can be found as quatrain 12 in the Diwan of Abū-Sa'īd (for instance, as translated by Reza Ordoubadian). Its association with Rumi is because it is frequently said to be written above the entrance to his tomb (although it doesn't seem to be there now).

Referencing Rumi quotes

Some of the quotes are referenced to verses (at least I imagine that's what the numbers mean) in the Mathnavi or other works of Rumi. Others are referenced to the English translation they were found in. I would like to request that, as much as possible, the quotes be referenced to the original Persian, so that they can be cross-referenced to translations in other languages (such as Spanish). Including references to the English versions is also useful, but not when you're trying to find the French version of the quote. DBlomgren 05:04, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Rumi. --Antiquary 18:33, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

• Bitter is made sweet through love;
  copper becomes gold through love.
  Through love dregs become clear;
  love heals all pain.
  Through love the king becomes slave;
  love brings the dead to life.
  • Translation by Aneela Khalid Arshed

• “There comes a time when nothing is meaningful except surrendering to love.”
  • supposedly by Rumi, but i don't find any source. maybe it's translated differently?

• Do you think I know what I’m doing?
  That for one breath or half a breath I belong to myself?
  As much as a pen knows what it is writing
  It may be the satisfaction I need depends on my going away
  So that when I’ve gone and come back, I’ll find it at home.
  • I don't know where the first three lines are from, but the last two are from, "In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo; In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad." I'll add it back to the page and source it. --Eekim (talk) 13:52, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

• He is like a man using a candle to look for the sun.

• Like a thief reason sneaked in and sat amongst the lovers eager to give them advice. They were unwilling to listen, so reason kissed their feet and went on its way.

• Only from the heart can you touch the sky.

• Pilgrimage to the place of the wise is to find escape from the flame of separateness.

• Reason is like an officer when the king appears. The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.

• Reason is powerless in the expression of Love.

• Return from existence to nonexistence. You are seeking the Lord and you belong to him. Nonexistence is a place of income; flee it not. This existence of more and less is a place of expenditure.

• Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.

• The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.

• The Eternal looked upon me for a moment with His eye of power, and annihilated me in His being, and become manifest to me in His essence. I saw I existed through Him.

• The lion is most handsome when looking for food.

• The way you make love is the way God will be with you.

• This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

• We can’t help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water.

• We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.

• When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you're not here, I can't go to sleep. Praise God for those two insomnias! And the difference between them.

• Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.

• You are quaffing drink from a hundred fountains: whenever any of these hundred yields less, your pleasure is diminished. But when the sublime fountain gushes from within you, no longer need you steal from the other fountains.

• You are the deep innerness of all things, the last word that can be spoken. To each of us you reveal yourselves differently: to the ship as coastline, to the shore as ship.

• “I said: what about my eyes? He said: Keep them on the road. I said: What about my passion? He said: Keep it burning. I said: What about my heart? He said: Tell me what you hold inside it? I said: Pain and sorrow. He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

• If all you can do is crawl, start crawling.

• Let the beauty of what you love be what you do. (This is currently poorly referenced on the live page)

Authenticity of Quotes Questionable

Unfortunately, none of the authors cited are fluent Persian speakers/translators. There is not a single Persian translator quoted here, most famous of all Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is the leading intellectual on Sufism and who has written over 50 books relating to Sufism. William Chittick is another author (The Sufi Path of Love: Spiritual Teachings of Rumi) which has not been quoted here. Many of the quotes seem to be translated by authors who have interpreted the works of Rumi in such a way that is not sufficient, at least to Rumi experts around the world. The wikiquote page for Rumi is good, and I don't mean to offend the people who worked hard to add the material on this page. But the credibility is questionable to say the least.

"Tell the tale in Persian so that all may understand it, even though they lack insight and are spiritually asleep" Sultan Walad

Another alleged quote

The Sufi Way:

You believe he is insane
because the music he dances to
cannot be grasped by your ears.

~ender 2012-10-21, 19:46:PM MST

No Title

I find this one especially ridiculous:

"Look for the answer inside your question."

 Jbgfour (talk) 14:27, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

A quote of doubtful attribution: Good discussion elsewhere

A friend quoted the beautiful words "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"; her source attributed this to Rumi. I went to the Wikiquote page on Rumi, which lists this as "misattributed", having found it in A Course in Miracles. I then asked myself, "Might 'A Course in Miracles' have repeated words that could properly be attributed to Rumi?" and found a quality discussion here. Post #41, from 2013, provides an answer that convinces me that the answer is no; but the discussion might interest others. Oaklandguy (talk) 22:43, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Coleman Barks is not a reliable translator

Coleman Barks does not even speak Farsi. All of his works are therefore misattributions. See for example this quote from The Iranian [1]:

"The essential problem of Coleman Barks lies in the fact that in his version he intentionally changes Rumi... He approaches Rumi's poetry as sacred texts, which need to be dusted from the passage of times by a touched devotee and prepared for the Post Modern, New Age market in the West. The New Age movement finds a remedy for modern alienation in old recipes, such as horoscope, Extra-Sensory Perception and divination... In order to remodel and fix Rumi for the American market Barks follows the path of a New-Age sufi. He tries to disconnect the mystical concepts of Rumi from their historical and social backgrounds and modify them for our contemporary taste... The falsification and misrepresentation of Rumi's fundamental concepts is not limited to Love and spreads to other ideas such as "wine", "master" and "Jesus" Lovingquotes (talk) 21:47, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

This provides a personal critique of a very popular rendition of the poetry as translated into English, which the reviewer cited above notes has become a "popular and a best-seller-book in the US." Whatever the perceived merits or deficiencies or flaws in the translations used by Barks in rendering them into poetry, there is NOT a proper justification in eliminating these widely quoted renditions from this article, as was recently done. I am thus restoring these passages from this widely respected work to the page. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki·†·⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 01:42, 8 January 2017 (UTC)