Barks Rumi Quotes & Sayings

Once you start your exercise routine and you include in your daily diet foods rich in calcium and potassium, you will start losing weight in about a week — Jeannette Murueta

... 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

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

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

All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire. — Rumi

There are few experiences in life as painful and brutal as the failure of a small business. For a small business conceived and nurtured by its owner is like a living, breathing child. Its loss is no less traumatic than losing a loved one. — William Manchee

An agreeable figure and winning manner, which inspire affection without love, are always new. Beauty loses its relish, the graces never, after the longest acquaintance, they are no less agreeable than at first. — Henry Home, Lord Kames

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

If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi's poetry is really remarkable. — Huston Smith

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

Our experience with newly-minted MBAs has not been that great. Their academic records always look terrific and the candidates always know just what to say; but too often they are short on personal commitment to the company and general business savvy. It's difficult to teach a new dog old tricks. — Warren Buffett

Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door. — Eric Hansen

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the colour of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which - though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off - the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations ... so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects ... — Thomas Pynchon

How different a loved and familiar spot appears, when viewed with the eye of probable guests. — Anne Bosworth Greene

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

Write like you're paid by the word; edit like you pay for every word. — Andy Hollandbeck

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

Very few people in the USA realize that a nuclear war was waged with nature in the southwest by their own military. — Steven Magee

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

It's a little bit of a 'if you can't beat 'em - join 'em' mentality for me when I think about Twitter. — Rob Lowe

[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

Most actors have to sit by the phone and wait for somebody to call them up to audition and stuff. I don't think I can exist in Hollywood just on that. I think I need to be proactive and making sure that things I really want to do are being developed to the point where somebody wants to make them. — Ice Cube

It isn't a matter of how long, or even how much you know. It's a way of looking at things, how much you see and how you think. I suppose it's, well, perspective ... When you start seein' five sides to a four-sided object, that's when you get the gray robe. — Hilari Bell

Jesus Christ never thinks about what we have been! He always thinks about what we are going to be. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

When Death lurks at the door, the physician is considered as a God. When danger has been overcome, the physician is looked upon as an angel. When the patient begins to convalesce, the physician becomes a mere human. When the physician asks for his fees, he is considered as the devil himself. — Hendrik Goltzius

Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair — Federico Garcia Lorca

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