Rumi Quotes — Wisdom Collection

Rumi Quotes — Collected Wisdom

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi was born in 1207 in the Persian-speaking east — Balkh
in present-day Afghanistan by the traditional account, the nearby town of Vakhsh by
more recent scholarship — and died in 1273 in Konya, in Anatolia. The Arabic name for
that region, Rum, is where his own name comes from: the Persian poet whose family fled
the Mongols and became known for the place he ended up. He was a jurist and preacher
until 1244, when he met a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz. Shams disappeared
four years later, and the grief of that friendship produced most of the poetry.

Two collections hold nearly everything quoted here: the Masnavi, some
25,000 rhymed couplets of teaching stories, and the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi,
roughly 40,000 verses of ecstatic lyric written in his friend’s name. The turning
ceremony people associate with him was formalised after his death by his son Sultan
Walad, who founded the Mevlevi order.

How Rumi reaches English

Almost none of the Rumi circulating in English is translation in the strict sense.
The scholarly translations — Reynold A. Nicholson’s complete Masnavi, and A. J.
Arberry’s selections — are literal and heavily footnoted, and they are not the ones
you see on posters. The popular versions come from Coleman Barks, an American poet who
does not read Persian and works instead from those earlier English translations,
producing what he himself calls versions rather than translations.

The consequence is worth knowing before you quote a line. Barks’s renderings are
often beautiful and often much shorter than the original, and they systematically thin
out the Quranic references that saturate Rumi’s Persian — a point Rozina Ali laid out
in The New Yorker in January 2017. Rumi was a Muslim scholar who taught the
Quran daily; the wholly universal, unreligious Rumi of internet quotation is partly an
artefact of translation choices.

The obsession underneath the lines

Read forty of these in a row and one thing repeats: separation. Not longing for a
person, and not for an idea, but the specific ache of having had something and lost the
company of it. The reed flute that opens the Masnavi is crying because it was cut from
the reed bed. The field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing is somewhere two people can
finally meet. Even the lines about joy are written from the far side of a loss.

This is why Rumi survives translation better than most mystics. The theology is
dense and culturally specific; the grief is not.

Lines commonly attributed to Rumi that are hard to find in Rumi

Three of the most shared examples: “Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that
grows flowers, not thunder” has no identified Persian source and appears only in
recent English. “The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear” is attributed
to Rumi constantly and also to Ram Dass, who used it as a Baba Ram Dass slogan in the
1970s. “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion” is a Barks
version rather than a rendering of a locatable couplet.

None of that makes them worthless. It makes them anonymous, which is a different
thing, and worth being honest about if you are putting a name under a line.

Where to read him properly

If a line here catches, the next step is the Masnavi in Nicholson’s translation for
accuracy, or Arberry’s Mystical Poems of Rumi for something readable that is
still translation. Fihi Ma Fihi — his recorded discourses, published in English
as Discourses of Rumi — is the least poetic and the most direct, and it is
where you find out what he actually taught.