Wisdom Keepers
TOP-10 Spiritual Authors
Wisdom, philosophy, and timeless quotes from the teachers who shaped modern consciousness
Carlos Castaneda
↗ WikipediaBiography
Peruvian-American anthropologist and writer whose works describe apprenticeship with a Yaqui shaman named don Juan Matus. Whether read as ethnography or visionary literature, his books revolutionized how millions approached perception, fear, and personal power.
Philosophy
Castaneda invites the reader to question ordinary reality. The warrior's way is not aggression but impeccability — conserving energy, facing death as an advisor, and dismantling the self-importance that drains a life. Through disciplined attention, one can perceive the world as an unfathomable mystery rather than a collection of fixed facts.
Famous Quotes · 24 total
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.
A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.
Things don't change. You change your way of looking, that's all.
The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.
Death is the only wise adviser that we have.
Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.
For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length.
Self-importance is man's greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men.
Nothing in this world is a gift. Whatever must be learned must be learned the hard way.
The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.
In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.
Once you decide something, you should go ahead and have no second thoughts.
To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives.
Power rests on the kind of knowledge that one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?
A warrior thinks of death when things become unclear.
Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.
You say you need help. Help for what? You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life.
The hardest thing in the world is to assume the mood of a warrior. It is of no use to be sad and complain and feel justified in doing so, believing that someone is always doing something to us.
We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk.
A warrior takes responsibility for his acts, for the most trivial of acts.
Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.
What makes us unhappy is to want. Yet if we would learn to cut our wants to nothing, the smallest thing we'd get would be a true gift.
Richard Bach
↗ Official siteBiography
American writer and aviator whose allegorical novellas became global phenomena in the 1970s. A former USAF pilot and barnstormer, Bach translated his love of flight into metaphors for spiritual freedom and self-transcendence.
Philosophy
Reality is more flexible than we are taught. Bach's parables suggest that limits are agreements we can outgrow. Learning, practice, and love are the engines of evolution — whether one is a seagull mastering flight or a soul remembering its wings.
Famous Quotes · 24 total
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't.
Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.
Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it.
The simplest things are often the truest.
Don't be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.
To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there.
Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
We are all. We are one.
Like attracts like. As we think, so do we attract.
You teach best what you most need to learn.
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
If you love something set it free. If it comes back to you it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was.
There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands.
You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.
The original sin is to limit the Is. Don't.
Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.
Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!
Real love stories never have endings.
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
Why is it that the people who need the most help won't take it?
Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.
Paulo Coelho
↗ Official blogBiography
Brazilian lyricist and novelist, one of the most widely read authors in the world. After a turbulent youth — institutionalized as a teenager, travel, songwriting — he committed to writing as a spiritual vocation. The Alchemist has sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.
Philosophy
Coelho writes the journey as sacrament. Personal Legend — one's deepest calling — is not found through comfort but through omens, risk, and the courage to leave the familiar. The universe conspires with those who dare to follow what the heart already knows.
Famous Quotes · 24 total
And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.
When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.
One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.
Tears are words that need to be written.
Don't give in to your fears. If you do, you won't be able to talk to your heart.
Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.
People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.
The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.
There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.
When you can't go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward.
If you conclude that life has meaning, then you must have the courage to live that meaning.
The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.
Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.
Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
Don't allow your mind to tell your heart what to do. The mind gives up easily.
You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.
Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.
We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation.
Close some doors today. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they lead you nowhere.
Happiness is something that multiplies when it is divided.
The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.
When each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives.
Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
↗ osho.comBiography
Indian mystic and professor of philosophy who attracted a global following. His discourses on Zen, Tantra, Sufism, and modern psychology emphasized meditation not as technique alone but as a quality of wakefulness carried into ordinary life.
Philosophy
Osho taught that no outer authority can liberate you — only awareness can. Meditation is the art of watching the mind without becoming its slave. Celebration, silence, and courage to be alone are pillars of a free human being.
Famous Quotes · 40 total
Be — don't try to become.
Life begins where fear ends.
Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it.
Courage is a love affair with the unknown.
If you love a flower, don't pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.
Nobody has the power to take two steps together; you can take only one step at a time.
Experience life in all possible ways — good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don't be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.
To be creative means to be in love with life.
Friendship is the purest love. It is the highest form of love where nothing is asked for, no condition, where one simply enjoys giving.
Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches.
Don't seek, don't search, don't ask, don't knock, don't demand — relax.
The moment you accept yourself, you become beautiful.
Truth is not to be found outside. No teacher, no scripture can give it to you. It is inside you and if you wish to attain it, seek your own company. Be with yourself.
Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.
The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.
A little foolishness, enough to enjoy life, and a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do.
Whatever you feel, you become. It is your responsibility.
They say: Think twice before you jump. I say: Jump first and then think as much as you want.
Each person comes into this world with a specific destiny — he has something to fulfill, some message has to be delivered, some work has to be completed. You are not here accidentally — you are here meaningfully.
Drop the mind and the divine. God is not an object, it is a merger. The mind resists a merger, the mind insists on separation.
Take hold of your own life. See that the whole existence is celebrating.
Listen to your being. It is continuously giving you hints; it is a still, small voice. It does not shout at you, that is true. And if you are a little silent you will start feeling your way.
Only those who are ready to become nobodies are able to love.
Meditation is a surrender, it is not a demand. It is not forcing existence your way, it is relaxing into the way existence wants you to be.
Love is the goal, life is the journey.
You feel good, you feel bad, and these feelings are bubbling from your own unconsciousness, from your own past. Nobody is responsible except you.
Relationship means something complete, finished, closed. Love is never a relationship; love is relating.
The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.
You exist in time, but you belong to eternity.
Tomorrow never comes, it is always today.
Zen is not a religion, it is the religiousness itself: no dogma, no doctrine, no scripture.
Truth is your innermost core. Don't go on looking for it outside; close your eyes and look within.
When the ego is gone, the whole individuality arises in its crystal purity.
Find ecstasy within yourself. It is not out there. It is in your innermost flowering. The one you are looking for is you.
It is beautiful to be alone, it is also beautiful to be in love, to be with people. And they are complementary, not contradictory.
Mind: a beautiful servant, a dangerous master.
Respect life, revere life. There is nothing more holy than life, nothing more divine than life.
Discover yourself, otherwise you have to depend on other people's opinions who don't know themselves.
Always remember to judge everything by your inner feeling of bliss.
Going with the flow is responding to cues from the universe. When you go with the flow, you're surfing life force.
Eckhart Tolle
↗ Official siteBiography
German-born spiritual teacher whose depression and inner crisis in his twenties culminated in a profound awakening at age 29. The Power of Now became one of the most influential spiritual books of the modern era, bridging Eastern wisdom and Western psychology.
Philosophy
Suffering arises from identification with the thinking mind and its stories about past and future. Presence — conscious alignment with the Now — dissolves the pain-body and reveals awareness itself as our deepest identity. Awakening is not escape from life but full entry into it.
Famous Quotes · 40 total
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.
Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
The past has no power over the present moment.
What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.
Wherever you are, be there totally.
If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don't have a life. You are life.
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you.
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
Stress is caused by being 'here' but wanting to be 'there'.
Being must be felt. It can't be thought.
It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.
Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.
To love is to recognize yourself in another.
Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.
The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind.
Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.
Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.
Give up defining yourself — to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life.
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to die before you die — and find that there is no death.
Life is the dancer and you are the dance.
Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.
The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: you create a good future by creating a good present.
Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is.
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction.
As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease.
Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it.
In today's rush, we all think too much — seek too much — want too much — and forget about the joy of just being.
Hermann Hesse
↗ WikipediaBiography
German-Swiss poet and novelist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. His novels explore the inward journey — the tension between bourgeois life and the call toward authenticity, mysticism, and artistic devotion.
Philosophy
Hesse believed enlightenment cannot be transmitted as doctrine; it must be lived. His heroes wander, err, suffer, and listen — to rivers, to elders, to the quiet voice beneath personality. Wisdom grows where intellect surrenders to experience.
Famous Quotes · 24 total
Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
You are not the only person to have despaired, but you are doubtless one of the few to have despaired so thoroughly and so logically.
Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.
I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.
It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.
Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
When someone seeks, it happens easily that he only sees the thing he is seeking; he is unable to find anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking.
The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.
We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other.
Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life.
Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish.
I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own.
He who is able to love is happy. But no one who loves is forced to expect that his love will be requited.
As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.
One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.
To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space.
The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative.
Nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
Don Miguel Ruiz
↗ Official siteBiography
Mexican author and nagual (shaman) in the Toltec tradition. Trained as a surgeon, a near-fatal car accident redirected him toward the ancestral wisdom taught by his mother. The Four Agreements became a cornerstone of modern self-help spirituality.
Philosophy
We are domesticated by belief systems that create needless suffering. Freedom returns when we speak impeccably, refuse to take things personally, avoid assumptions, and always do our best. Love begins with an impeccable relationship to oneself.
Famous Quotes · 24 total
Be impeccable with your word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean.
Don't take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality.
Don't make assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want.
Always do your best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; under any circumstance, simply do your best.
Whatever happens around you, don't take it personally. Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.
The truth is the most important part of being impeccable with your word.
We have the need to be accepted and to be loved by others, but we cannot accept and love ourselves.
Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive.
You are alive, so take your life and enjoy it. Love is life. Be courageous and take risks. Life is nothing without the flavor of love.
The real you is still a little child who never grew up. Sometimes that little child comes out when you are having fun or playing.
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can.
If someone is not treating you with love and respect, it is a gift if they walk away from you.
Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they should be.
All the emotions that make you suffer when you take things personally come from believing in lies.
Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.
We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do. We assume that others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge.
Just imagine the relationship you will have with yourself when you no longer judge yourself, when you no longer find yourself guilty.
Doubt takes us behind the words we hear to the intent behind them.
Your home, your reality, belongs to you and you alone. Respect the reality of others as you respect your own.
When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.
The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough.
Action is about living fully. Inaction is the way that we deny life.
Forgiveness is the only way to heal. We can choose to forgive because we feel compassion for ourselves.
Wherever you go you will find people lying to you, and as your awareness grows, you will notice that you also lie to yourself.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
↗ Krishnamurti FoundationBiography
Indian philosopher and speaker raised by the Theosophical Society as a presumed world teacher, he later dissolved the Order of the Star and rejected all spiritual authority — including his own. For sixty years he taught inquiry without dogma.
Philosophy
Truth is a pathless land. No guru, scripture, or method can take you there. Only clear perception — seeing the actual movement of thought, fear, and desire without the observer — brings genuine transformation.
Famous Quotes · 40 total
Truth is a pathless land.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.
Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.
A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.
Fear is not of the unknown, but of the loss of the known.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is.
To ask the 'right' question is far more important than to receive the answer.
Listening is an art not easily come by, but in it there is beauty and great understanding.
You can only be afraid of what you think you know.
Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
Order cannot possibly be brought about through conformity to another pattern.
The observer is the observed.
Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it.
It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.
Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, 'That is an oak tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree?
Where there is jealousy, love is not.
The flowering of love is meditation.
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand.
Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all.
The mind has to be empty to see clearly.
Discontent is the beginning of inquiry.
You are the world and the world is you.
Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.
Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you.
When you once see something as false which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human, then you can never go back to it.
What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it.
The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.
Alan Watts
↗ alanwatts.orgBiography
British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker who interpreted Eastern wisdom for Western audiences with wit and lucidity. Episcopal priest turned Zen student, he became one of the most beloved voices of the counterculture era.
Philosophy
We are not separate egos trapped in bags of skin — we are the universe experiencing itself. Watts used Zen and Taoism to expose the comedy of trying to grasp life with the intellect alone. Play, spontaneity, and presence reveal what striving cannot.
Famous Quotes · 40 total
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
A scholar tries to learn something every day; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
The art of living is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment.
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Philosophy is man's expression of curiosity about everything.
What I am really saying is that you don't need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water.
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Life is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be had.
The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath.
Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience.
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
The menu is not the meal.
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.
It's better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.
To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies.
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi)
↗ WikipediaBiography
Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic whose works are among the best-selling poems in the United States. After meeting the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, Rumi's scholarly life ignited into ecstatic verse celebrating love as the doorway to the Divine.
Philosophy
Love is not sentiment — it is the force that shatters the ego and reunites the soul with its source. Rumi's poetry maps the stages of longing, surrender, and union. Every form is a mirror of the Beloved; grief and joy alike are invitations to remember.
Famous Quotes · 40 total
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
What you seek is seeking you.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?
Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.
Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.
Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
When you let go of who you are, you become who you might be.
Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.
Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.
The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.
You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.
Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.
Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.
Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you.
Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.
The garden of the world has no limits, except in your mind.
Be grateful for your life, every detail of it, and your face will come to shine like a sun.
Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.
There is a voice that doesn't use words. Listen.
Patience is the key to joy.
Grief can be the garden of compassion.
As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth.
The cure for pain is in the pain.
Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.
Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
Don't be sad. Whatever you lose, it comes round in another form.
Your heart is the size of an ocean. Go find yourself in its hidden depths.
Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure.
Travel brings power and love back into your life.
Respond to every call that excites your spirit.
This page describes what the spiritual literature and contemplative practice tradition teaches and how people practise it. It is not a prediction and not medical, psychiatric or crisis advice. How we research and write · report an error