Coleman Barks Quotes & Sayings

Solitude is a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words. — Coleman Barks

Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'
doesn't make sense any more. — Coleman Barks

There's some sort of exchange that goes on between human beings that is one of the highest things we do. — Coleman Barks

These poems need to be released from their cages, — Coleman Barks

I think my life is tremendously interesting, and surely, other people do too. — Coleman Barks

... the work of the (Muslim Sufi) dervish community
was to open the heart,
explore the mystery of union,
to fiercely search for and try to say the truth,
and to celebrate the glory and difficulty
in being in human incarnation. — Coleman Barks

We were all born by accident but this wandering caravan
will make camp in perfection
Forget the nonsense categories of there and here, race, nation, religion, starting point and destination
You are soul, and you are love, ...
No more questions now as to what it is we're doing here — Coleman Barks

I had been a kind of natural mystic my whole life, growing up there in Tennessee next to the river. Somehow, that was important for my consciousness. I still don't study [mysticism]. I just wait for experiences. — Coleman Barks

We sometimes make spiderwebs of smoke and saliva, fragile though-packets
Leave thinking to the one who gave intelligence
Stop weaving and watch how the pattern improve — Coleman Barks

A man once asked Rumi, "Why is it you talk so much about silence?" His answer: "The radiant one inside me has never said a word. — Coleman Barks

From 'A Bowl Fallen From the Roof'
Be quiet now and wait.
It may be that the ocean one,
the one we desire so to move into and become,
desires us out here on land a little longer,
going our sundry ways to the shore.
-Rumi — Coleman Barks

Everything is conversation. — Coleman Barks

In the front yard lives the oldest thing around, a white oak
That I used to say is my love for the world,
That I now would just call love as it is.
Belonging to nobody, no metaphor, the very. — Coleman Barks

A story has come down about Rumi: a woman asks if he would say something to her young boy about his eating too much of a particular kind of white-sugar candy. Rumi tells her to come back in two weeks. She does, and he tells her again to come in two weeks. She does, and he advises the child to cut down on sweets.
"Why did you not say this a month ago?"
"Because I had to see if I could resist having that candy for two weeks. I couldn't. Then I tried again and was successful. Only now can I tell him to try not to have so much. — Coleman Barks

Anything you grab hold of on the bank breaks with the river's pressure. When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current. — Coleman Barks

Fold within fold, the beloved
drowns in its own being. This world
is drenched with that drowning. — Coleman Barks

If you think there's an important difference between being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist, then you're making a division between your heart, what you love with, and the way you act in the world. — Coleman Barks

Little by little a person reaches forty and fifty and sixty, and feels more complete. God could've thrown full blown prophets flying through the cosmos in an instant. — Coleman Barks

If you teach three university courses a day, you need something to turn your mind off. — Coleman Barks

I have no name for what circles so perfectly. — Coleman Barks

The religions of the world are luminous in their individuality, and they have valuable social and soulmaking functions. Surely someday we will quit killing each other over their different strategies. — Coleman Barks

Water the fruit trees, and don't water the thorns. Be generous to what nurtures the spirit and God's luminous reason-light. Don't honor what causes dysentry and knotted up tumors. — Coleman Barks

Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in. — Coleman Barks

WHAT WAS TOLD, THAT
What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest.
What was told the cypress that made it strong and straight, what was
whispered the jasmine so it is what it is, whatever made sugarcane sweet, whatever
was said to the inhabitants of the town of Chigil in Turkestan that makes them
so handsome, whatever lets the pomegranate flower blush like a human face, that is
being said to me now. I blush. Whatever put eloquence in language, that's happening here.
The great warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude, chewing a piece of sugarcane,
in love with the one to whom every that belongs! — Coleman Barks

When you meet a new friend, the world has more light in it, doesn't it? Things become more spontaneous, and more full of laughing and freedom and novelty. — Coleman Barks

Ramana Maharshi and Rumi would agree: the joy of being human is in uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin. — Coleman Barks

[Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity ... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral ... — Coleman Barks

I like to walk around my neighborhood, late in the afternoon. I sometimes wind up at the wonderful, old Shell station that's been changed into a coffee shop. Right where Johnny used to change my oil, I have a latte and take out my little book bag. It doesn't sound very austere. — Coleman Barks

It's a beautiful lucid dream that has language that I can fiddle with. — Coleman Barks

Just being sentient and in a body with the sun coming up is a state of rapture. — Coleman Barks

I think we all have a core that's ecstatic, that knows and that looks up in wonder. We all know that there are marvelous moments of eternity that just happen. We know them. — Coleman Barks

What I deeply want ... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self. — Coleman Barks

It's such a foolish thing to argue about names, when what we're doing is all one thing. — Coleman Barks