Reader > Reader's Quotes

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“What you seek is seeking you.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“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.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi

“This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor...Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”
― Rumi

“I know you're tired but come, this is the way.”
― Jalalu'l-din Rumi

“A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.”
― Rumi, Words of Paradise: Selected Poems of Rumi

“I closed my mouth and spoke to you in a hundred silent ways.”
― Rumi

“Reason is powerless in the expression of Love.”
― Rumi

“In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

Drumsound rises on the air,
its throb, my heart.

A voice inside the beat says,
"I know you're tired,
but come. This is the way."

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

Fish don't hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“There is no right life in the wrong one.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“No longer shy about how I love. My eyes open. You are everywhere.”
― Rumi

“Hell is—other people!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Don't ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western.
Divisions only lead to more divisions.

Love has no labels, no definitions.
It is what it is, pure and simple.
Love is the water of life and a lover is a soul of fire!

The universe turns differently when fire loves water.”
― Elif Safak, The Forty Rules of Love

“The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”
― Sylvia Plath

“There are only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you depart this world of ours: children and art.”
― Stephen Sondheim "Sunday in the Park with George"

“...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready... The teacher will Disappear.”
― Tao Te Ching