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Great quotes and aphorisms on dreams

The post Quotes and ideas on vacation first appeared on The World of English.

Carl Gustav Jung best quotes

Carl William Brown — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:59:13 +0000

Carl Gustav Jung best quotes

Carl Gustav Jung best quotes and aphorisms, ideas, thoughts, maxims, and pearls of wisdom from the great Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and philosopher.

Like mists arising from a marsh, the dead came near and cried: Speak further unto us concerning the supreme god. Hard to know is the deity of Abraxas. Its power is the greatest, because man perceiveth it not. From the sun he draweth the summum bonum; from the devil the infimum malum: but from Abraxas LIFE, altogether indefinite, the mother of good and evil.
Carl Gustav Jung Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. 1916

A collection of a hundred Great brains makes one big fathead.
Carl Gustav Jung

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
Carl Gustav Jung

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
Carl Gustav Jung

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
Carl Gustav Jung

A ‘scream’ is always just that – a noise and not music.
Carl Gustav Jung

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Carl Gustav Jung

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.
Carl Gustav Jung

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Carl Gustav Jung

Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture challenging the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man – his daring and his aspirations. Should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life. What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?
Carl Gustav Jung

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
Carl Gustav Jung

Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
Carl Gustav Jung

Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?
Carl Gustav Jung

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
Carl Gustav Jung

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
Carl Gustav Jung

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes’. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
Carl Gustav Jung

A dream that, despite being manifest, does not interpret itself, and never has a clear meaning. No dream says, “You must,” or “This is the truth.” It presents an image, like nature makes a plant grow, and we must draw the consequences.
Carl Gustav Jung

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
Carl Gustav Jung

For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.
Carl Gustav Jung

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
Carl Gustav Jung

I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.
Carl Gustav Jung

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
Carl Gustav Jung

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
Carl Gustav Jung

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
Carl Gustav Jung

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
Carl Gustav Jung

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
Carl Gustav Jung

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
Carl Gustav Jung

It is on the whole probable that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.
Carl Gustav Jung

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Gustav Jung

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Carl Gustav Jung

Life not lived is a disease from which one can die.
Carl Gustav Jung

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.
Carl Gustav Jung

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.
Carl Gustav Jung

Aphorisms and quotes by Carl Jung

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
Carl Gustav Jung

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.
Carl Gustav Jung

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Carl Gustav Jung

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
Carl Gustav Jung

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Carl Gustav Jung

Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.
Carl Gustav Jung

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.
Carl Gustav Jung

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Carl Gustav Jung

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Carl Gustav Jung

Our blight is ideologies – they are the long-expected Antichrist!
Carl Gustav Jung

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Carl Gustav Jung

Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth.
Carl Gustav Jung

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
Carl Gustav Jung

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Carl Gustav Jung

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
Carl Gustav Jung

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
Carl Gustav Jung

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality
Carl Gustav Jung

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.
Carl Gustav Jung

The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.
Carl Gustav Jung

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.
Carl Gustav Jung

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.
Carl Gustav Jung

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Gustav Jung

The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Gustav Jung

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung

The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire.
Carl Gustav Jung

The educated man tries to repress the inferior one in himself, without realizing that by this he forces the latter to become revolutionary.
Carl Gustav Jung

The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
Carl Gustav Jung

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
Carl Gustav Jung

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.
Carl Gustav Jung

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.
Carl Gustav Jung

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
Carl Gustav Jung

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
Carl Gustav Jung

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Carl Gustav Jung

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
Carl Gustav Jung

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
Carl Gustav Jung

The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man.
Carl Gustav Jung

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
Carl Gustav Jung

The primary cause of unhappiness in the world today is… lack of faith.
Carl Gustav Jung

The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods.
Carl Gustav Jung

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
Carl Gustav Jung

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
Carl Gustav Jung

The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Fuhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.
Carl Gustav Jung

The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.
Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung quotes and ideas

The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Carl Gustav Jung

There can be no transforming of darkness into light, and of apathy into movement, without emotion.
Carl Gustav Jung

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Carl Gustav Jung

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.
Carl Gustav Jung

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
Carl Gustav Jung

We are all born originals and die copies.
Carl Gustav Jung

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
Carl Gustav Jung

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Carl Gustav Jung

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
Carl Gustav Jung

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
Carl Gustav Jung

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one’s own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one’s ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one’s subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.
Carl Gustav Jung

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
Carl Gustav Jung

We survive by what we receive, but we live by what we give.
Carl Gustav Jung

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
Carl Gustav Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl Gustav Jung

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books, but lives in our very blood?
Carl Gustav Jung

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
Carl Gustav Jung

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Gustav Jung

On the same subject you can also read:

Sigmund Freud quotations

Thoughts and reflections on dreams

Freud on humour and jokes

Osho quotes and aphorisms

The post Carl Gustav Jung best quotes first appeared on The World of English.

Jalal al-Din Rumi quotes and aphorisms

Carl William Brown — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:57:42 +0000

Rumi quotes and aphorisms

Jalal al-Din Rumi quotes and aphorisms, great words of wisdom and poetry of the most famous and influential Persian mystics and spiritual poets in history.

A divine dance appears in the soul and the body at the time of peace and union. Anyone can learn the dance, just listen to the music.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A warm, rainy day-this is how it feels when friends get together. Friend refreshes friend then, as flowers do each others, in a spring rain.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A wealth you cannot imagine flows through you. Do not consider what strangers say. Be secluded in your secret heart-house, that bowl of silence.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Achieve some perfection yourself, so that you may not fall into sorrow by seeing the perfection in others.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

All that you think is rain is not. Behind the veil angels sometimes weep.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

All your anxiety is because of your desire for harmony. Seek disharmony, then you will gain peace.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think and twice as beautiful as you’d ever imagined.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Always search for your innermost nature in those you are with, as rose oil imbibes from roses.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

And so it is, that both the Devil and the angelic Spirit present us with objects of desire to awaken our power of choice.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Anyone who genuinely and consistently with both hands looks for something, will find it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Anything which is more than our necessity is poison. It may be power, wealth, hunger, ego, greed, laziness, love, ambition, hate or anything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be a helpful friend, and you will become a green tree with always new fruit, always deeper journeys into love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be grateful for your life, every detail of it, and your face will come to shine like a sun, and everyone who sees it will be made glad and peaceful.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be kind and honest, and harmful poisons will turn sweet inside you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be an empty page, untouched by words.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be drunk with love, for love is all that exists.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be full of sorrow, that you may become hill of joy; weep, that you may break into laughter.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be soulful. Be kind. Be in love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be kind to yourself, dear – to our innocent follies. Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance. You will come to see that all evolves us.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be like the sun for grace and mercy. Be like the night to cover others’ faults. Be like running water for generosity. Be like death for rage and anger. Be like the Earth for modesty. Appear as you are. Be as you appear.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be patient where you sit in the dark. The dawn is coming.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Be with those who help your being.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Beg of God the removal of envy, that God may deliver you from externals, and bestow upon you an inward occupation, which will absorb you so that your attention is not drawn away.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

By God, when you see your beauty you will be the idol of yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Beyond the rightness or wrongness of things there is a field, I’ll meet you there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

But listen to me. For one moment quit being sad. Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Caught by our own thoughts, we worry about everything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Clean out your ears, don’t listen for what you already know.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Come out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Concentrate on the Essence, concentrate on the light.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dance where you can break yourself up to pieces and totally abandon your worldly passions.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dance, and make joyous the love around you. Dance, and your veils which hide the Light shall swirl in a heap at your feet.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dance until you shatter yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dancing is not just getting up painlessly, like a leaf blown on the wind; dancing is when you tear your heart out and rise out of your body to hang suspended between the worlds.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces and giving up your soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Daylight, full of small dancing particles and the one great turning, our souls are dancing with you, without feet, they dance. Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets. The moon sets. But they are not gone.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Discard yourself and thereby regain yourself. Spread the trap of humility and ensnare love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Do good to the people for the sake of God or for the peace of your own soul that you may always see what is pure and save your heart from the darkness of hate.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Do not worry if all the candles in the world flicker and die. We have the spark that starts the fire.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Do you pay regular visits to yourself? Start now.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t be sad! Because God sends hope in the most desperate moments. Don’t forget, the heaviest rain comes out of the darkest clouds.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t dismiss the heart, even if it’s filled with sorrow. God’s treasures are buried in broken hearts.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t get lost in your pain, know that one day your pain will become your cure.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t make yourself miserable with what is to come or not to come.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Don’t you know yet? It is your Light that lights the worlds.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Each moment contains a hundred messages from God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Either give me more wine or leave me alone.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Every moment is made glorious by the light of love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Every need brings what’s needed. Pain bears its cure like a child. Having nothing produces provisions. Ask a difficult question, and the marvelous answer appears.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everyone is overridden by thoughts; that’s why they have so much heartache and sorrow.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything about yesterday has gone with yesterday. Today, it is needed to say new things.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything is emptiness. Everything else, accidental. Emptiness brings peace to your loving. Everything else, disease. In this world of trickery, emptiness is what your soul wants.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Friend, our closeness is this: anywhere you put your foot, feel me in the firmness under you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Friendship of the wise is good; a wise enemy is better than a foolish friend.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being. Halfheartedness does not reach into majesty!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites so that you will have two wings to fly, not one
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Grace comes to forgive and then forgive again.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Gratitude is the wine for the soul. Go on. Get drunk.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Greed makes man blind and foolish, and makes him an easy prey for death.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

How do I know who I am or where I am? How could a single wave locate itself in an ocean.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

However much I might try to expound or explain Love, when I come to Love itself, I am ashamed of my explanations… Love alone can explain the mysteries of love and lovers.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am a child whose teacher is love surely my master won’t let me grow to be a fool.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am in the House of Mercy, and my heart is a place of prayer.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am yours. Don’t give myself back to me.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I choose to love you in silence, for in silence I find no rejection. I choose to love you in loneliness, for in loneliness no one owns you but me. I choose to adore you from a distance. For distance will shield me from pain. I choose to kiss you in the wind, for the wind is gentler than my lips. I choose to hold you in my dreams, for me in dreams, you have no ends.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have found the heart and will never leave this house of light.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have neither a soul nor a body, for I come from the very Soul of all souls.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have no companion but Love, no beginning, no end, no dawn. The soul calls from within me: ‘You, ignorant of the way of Love, set me free.’
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I learned that every mortal will taste death. But only some will taste life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I lost my hat while gazing at the moon, and then I lost my mind.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I once had a thousand desires. But in my one desire to know you all else melted away.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I am not this hair, I am not this skin, I am the soul that lives within.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my Soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have no companion but Love, no beginning, no end, no dawn. The Soul calls from within me: ‘You, ignorant of the way of Love, set Me free.’
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I have seen the king with a face of Glory, He who is the eye and the sun of heaven, He who is the companion and healer of all beings, He who is the soul and the universe that births souls.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I know you’re tired but come, this is the way.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I should be suspicious of what I want.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If all you can do is crawl, start crawling.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If I love myself, I love you. If I love you, I love myself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If light is in your heart, you will find your way home.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you find the mirror of the heart dull, the rust has not been cleared from its face.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In the blackest of your moments, wait with no fear.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone and come back, I’ll find it at home.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

It’s your road and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If destiny comes to help you, love will come to meet you. A life without love isn’t a life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If reason dominates in man, he rises higher than angels. If lust overpowers man, he descends lower than the beast.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If something makes you happy in this world, you should think of what will happen to you if that thing were taken away.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you are looking for a friend who is faultless, you will be friendless.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your perception.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you love someone, you are always joined with them – in joy, in absence, in solitude, in strife.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you want money more than anything, you’ll be bought and sold your whole life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you want to win hearts, sow the seeds of Love. If you want heaven, stop scattering thorns on the road.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Jalal al-Din Rumi quotes

If you wish to be a mine of jewels, open the deep ocean within your heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you wish to shine like day, burn up the night of self-existence. Dissolve in the Being who is everything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In each moment the fire rages, it will burn away a hundred veils. And carry you a thousand steps toward your goal.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In order to understand the dance one must be still. And in order to truly understand stillness one must dance.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

In their seeking, wisdom and madness are one and the same. On the path of love, friend and stranger are one and the same.
Jalal al-Din 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.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Inside any deep asking is the answering.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

It is certain that an atom of goodness on the path of faith is never lost.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Join the community of saints and know the delight of your own soul. Enter the ruins of your heart and learn the meaning of humility.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Joy lives concealed in grief.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Keep silent, because the world of silence is a vast fullness.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Knock, and He’ll open the door. Vanish, and He’ll make you shine like the sun. Fall, and He’ll raise you to the heavens. Become nothing, and He’ll turn you into everything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Laugh as much as you breathe. Love as long as you live.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let silence be the art you practice.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let silence take you to the core of life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let your teacher be love itself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let yourself become living poetry.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let go of your mind and then be mindful. Close your ears and listen.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars mirrored in your own being.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let us carve gems out of our stony hearts and let them light our path to love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Let’s rise above this animalistic behavior and be kind to one another.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Listen to the sound of waves within you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Listen to the unstruck sounds, and what sifts through that music.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Look at the moon in the sky, not the one in the lake.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Looking up gives light, although at first it makes you dizzy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love is the water of life, jump into this water.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love is the water of life. Everything other than love for the most beautiful God is agony of the spirit, though it be sugar-eating. What is agony of the spirit? To advance toward death without seizing hold of the water of life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love risks everything and asks for nothing.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love is the bridge between you and everything.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love will find its way through all languages on its own.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Lovers have heartaches that can’t be cured by drugs or sleep, or games, but only by seeing their beloved.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it. It will turn to gold. Resurrection will be now. Every moment, a new beauty.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

May these vows and this marriage be blessed.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

May this marriage be full of laughter, our every day in paradise.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Move, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My dear heart, never think you are better than others. Listen to their sorrows with compassion. If you want peace, don’t harbor bad thoughts, do not gossip and don’t teach what you do not know.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My friend, the sufi is the friend of the present moment. To say tomorrow is not our way.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown. My heart is expanding a thousand fold.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My heart, sit only with those who know and understand you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

My words are like a ship, and the sea is their meaning. Come to me and I will take you to the depths of spirit. I will meet you there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Now be silent. Let the One who creates the words speak. He made the door. He made the lock. He also made the key.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Now I am sober and there’s only the hangover and the memory of love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

O, happy the soul that saw its own faults.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry moving through and be silent. Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Oh soul, you worry too much. You have seen your own strength. You have seen your own beauty. You have seen your golden wings. Of anything less, why do you worry? You are in truth the soul, of the soul, of the soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Oh! Joy for he who has escaped from this world of perfumes and color! For beyond these colors and these perfumes, these are other colors in the heart and the soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Oh, bird of my soul, fly away now, For I possess a hundred fortified towers.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Only from the heart can you touch the sky.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty. Today is such a day.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

On the path of love we are neither masters nor the owners of our lives. We are only a brush in the hand of the master painter.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

On what is fear: Non-acceptance of uncertainty. If we accept that uncertainty, it becomes an adventure!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

One of the marvels of the world: The sight of a soul sitting in prison with the key in its hand.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Open your hands if you want to be held.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Our greatest strength lies in the gentleness and tenderness of our heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Patience is the key to joy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Peaceful is the one who’s not concerned with having more or less. Unbound by name and fame, he is free from sorrow from the world and mostly from himself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Plant the love of the holy ones within your spirit; don’t give your heart to anything, but the love of those whose hearts are glad.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Prayer clears the mist and brings back peace to the soul.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Respond to every call that excites your spirit.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Seek the sound that never ceases. Seek the sun that never sets.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Seek the wisdom that will untie your knot. Seek the path that demands your whole being.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Shine like the whole universe is yours.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Silence gives answers.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sit, be still, and listen.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk into the river. Listen to the ocean.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sit quietly and listen for a voice that will say, “Be more silent.” As that happens, your soul starts to revive.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment brings intuitive knowledge.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.
Jalal al-Din 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.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sorrow… 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.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah… it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Stay in the spiritual fire. Let it cook you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Stay with friends who support you in these. Talk with them about sacred texts, and how you are doing, and how they are doing, and keep your practices together.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Stop, open up, surrender the beloved blind silence. Stay there until you see you’re looking at the light with infinite eyes.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Rumi aphorisms and quotes

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Study me as much as you like, you will never know me. For I differ a hundred ways from what you see me to be.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Suffering is a gift; in its hidden mercy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sunlight fell upon the wall; the wall received a borrowed splendor. Why set your heart on a piece of earth, O simple one? Seek out the source which shines forever.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Take someone who doesn’t keep score, who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality: he’s free.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquillity.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The garden of love is green without limit and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy. Love is beyond either condition: without spring, without autumn, it is always fresh.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The gifts of lovers to one another are, in respect to love, nothing but forms; yet, they testify to invisible love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The lion is most handsome when looking for food.
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.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The moment I first heard love I gave up my soul, my heart, and my eyes.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door will open.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The soul has been given its own ears to hear things mind does not understand.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The source of now is here.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The spirit is so near that you can’t see it! But reach for it… don’t be a jar, full of water, whose rim is always dry. Don’t be the rider who gallops all night and never sees the horse that is beneath him.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The way the Beloved can fit in my heart, two thousand lives could fit in this body of mine. One kernel could contain a thousand bushels, and a hundred worlds pass through the eye of the needle.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The wealth within you, your essence, is your kingdom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The whole universe is contained within a single human being – you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a voice that doesn’t use words, listen.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is an invisible strength within us; when it recognizes two opposing objects of desire, it grows stronger.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is how it always is when I finish a poem, a great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is the essence of all sciences – that you should know who you will be when the Day of Reckoning arrives.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Through Love all that is bitter will be sweet, Through Love all that is copper will be gold, Through Love all dregs will become wine, through Love all pain will turn to medicine.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Tend to your vital heart, and all that you worry about will be solved.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Thankfulness brings you to the place where the beloved lives.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The beauty you see in me is a reflection of you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The desire to know your own soul will end all other desires.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The fault is in the one who blames. Spirit sees nothing to criticize.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The garden of the world has no limit except in your mind.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The garden of the world has no limits except in your mind.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The illuminated life can happen now, in the moments left. Die to your ego, and become a true human being.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The message behind the words is the voice of the heart.
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.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The Prophets accept all agony and trust it. For the water has never feared the fire.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The sky will bow down to your beauty, if you do.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The soul is here for its own joy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The universe and the light of the stars come through me.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The very center of your heart is where life begins. The most beautiful place on earth.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The world is a mountain, in which your words are echoed back to you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

The wound is the place where the light enters you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There are many ways to the Divine. I have chosen the ways of song, dance, and laughter.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life. There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine. O traveller, if you are in search of that, don’t look outside, look inside yourself and seek that.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a loneliness more precious than life. There is a freedom more precious than the world. Infinitely more precious than life and the world is that moment when one is alone with God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a moon inside every human being. Learn to be companions with it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is a path from me to you that I am constantly looking for.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is no salvation for the soul but to fall in love. Only lovers can escape out of these two worlds.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is nothing I want but your presence. In friendship, time dissolves.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then, there’s another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is a subtle truth. Whatever you love, you are.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This is what love does and continues to do. It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This sky where we live is no place to lose your wings so love, love, love.
Jalal al-Din 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.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This silence, this moment, every moment, if it’s genuinely inside you, brings what you need. There’s nothing to believe. Only when I stopped believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, ‘Be more silent.’ Die and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

This turning toward what you deeply love saves you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Those who don’t feel this love pulling them like a river, those who don’t drink dawn like a cup of springwater or take in sunset like a supper, those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Till man destroys “self” he is no true friend of God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

To become spiritual, you must die to self, and come alive in the Lord. Only then will the mysteries of God fall from your lips. To die to self through self-discipline causes suffering but brings you everlasting life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

To me, nothing in the world is as precious as a genuine smile, especially from a child.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Today, let us swim wildly, joyously in gratitude.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Touched. How did you get here? Close your eyes… and surrender!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Travel brings power and love back into your life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Travelers, it is late. Life’s sun is going to set. During these brief days that you have strength, be quick and spare no effort of your wings.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Truth lifts the heart, like water refreshes thirst.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Two there are who are never satisfied – the lover of the world and the lover of knowledge.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wild flowers will come up where you are.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Water, stories, the body, all the things we do, are mediums that hid and show what’s hidden.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another… It’s all praise, and it’s all right.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We are born of love; Love is our mother.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We are all the same… all the same… longing to find our way back… back to the One… back to the only One!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We came whirling out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust… The stars made a circle, and in the middle, we dance.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We can’t help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

We rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What hurts the soul? To live without tasting the water of its own essence.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What will our children do in the morning if they do not see us fly?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What is planted in each person’s soul will sprout.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What matters is how quickly you do what your soul directs.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What shall I say, O Muslims, I know not myself, I am neither a Christian, nor a Jew, nor a Zoroastrian, nor a Muslim.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

What you seek is seeking you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whatever happens to you, don’t fall in despair. Even if all the doors are closed, a secret path will be there for you that no one knows. You can’t see it yet but so many paradises are at the end of this path…Be grateful! It is easy to thank after obtaining what you want, thank before having what you want.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whatever happens, just keep smiling and lose yourself in love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whatever purifies you is the right path, I will not try to define it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whatever lifts the corners of your mouth, trust that.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When I die, I shall soar with angels, and when I die to the angels, what I shall become you cannot imagine.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When the world pushes you to your knees, you’re in the perfect position to pray.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When will you begin that long journey into yourself?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When a man makes up a story for his child, he becomes a father and a child together, listening.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When all your desires are distilled; You will cast just two votes – to love more, and be happy.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety; If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without any pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When setting out on a journey, do not seek advice from those who have never left home.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools, dig a way out through the bottom of the ocean.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When we practice loving kindness and compassion we are the first ones to profit.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you feel a peaceful joy, that’s when you are near truth.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you go through a hard period, when everything seems to oppose you, when you feel you cannot even bear one more minute, never give up! Because it is the time and place that the course will divert!
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you lose all sense of self, the bonds of a thousand chains will vanish.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

When you seek love with all your heart you shall find its echo in the universe.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whenever sorrow comes, be kind to it. For God has placed a pearl in sorrow’s hand.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whenever they rebuild an old building, they must first of all destroy the old one.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wherever water flows, life flourishes: wherever tears fall, divine mercy is shown.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whether one moves slowly or with speed, the one who is a seeker will be a finder.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Who could be so lucky? Who comes to a lake for water and sees the reflection of moon.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whoever has heart’s doors wide open, could see the sun itself in every atom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Whosoever knoweth the power of the dance, dwelleth in God.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why are you knocking at every door? Go, knock at the door of your own heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why are you so enchanted by this world, when a mine of gold lies within you?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why ever talk of miracles when you are destined to become infinite love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why should I be weary when every cell of my body is bursting with life?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Why, when God’s world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison, of all places?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Wisdom tells us we are not worthy; love tells us we are. My life flows between the two.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

With every breath, I plant the seeds of devotion, I am a farmer of the heart.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

With life as short as a half-taken breath, don’t plant anything but love.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Without love, all worship is a burden, all dancing is a chore, all music is mere noise.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Woman is a ray of God. She is not that earthly beloved: she is creative, not created.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Work. Keep digging your well. Water is there somewhere.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Would you become a pilgrim on the road of love? The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You are not one you are a thousand. Just light your lantern.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You have forgotten the One who doesn’t care about ownership, who doesn’t try to turn a profit from every human exchange.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You know the value of every article of merchandise, but if you don’t know the value of your own soul, it’s all foolishness.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You left and I cried tears of blood. My sorrow grows. Its not just that You left. But when You left my eyes went with You. Now, how will I cry?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You have no need to travel anywhere – journey within yourself. Enter a mine of rubies and bathe in the splendor of your own light.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You have within you more love than you could ever understand.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your heart is the size of an ocean. Go find yourself in its hidden depths.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your light is more magnificent than sunrise or sunset.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your radiance shines in every atom of creation yet our petty desires keep it hidden.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your task? To work with all the passion of your being to acquire an inner light.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You’ve come to know the fortunate and the inauspicious stars, but you don’t know whether you yourself are fortunate or lucky.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

You can also read:

Jiddu Krishnamurti best quotes

Jiddu Krishnamurti reflections

Thoughts and reflections on religion

The post Jalal al-Din Rumi quotes and aphorisms first appeared on The World of English.

Quotes and aphorisms on religion

Carl William Brown — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:38:18 +0000

Quotes and aphorisms on religion

Quotes and aphorisms on religion, great words of wisdom and different opinions by various authors on the most important social phenomenon of the world culture.

A nation that displays the shitty faces of poor religious idiots on the walls of its cities must by strict logic necessarily be destroyed, never mind the international law of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.
Louis Aragon

In the past, to subjugate the people, the powerful used force, laws and religion; now, they also have football and television.
Carl William Brown

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
Matthew Arnold

There is a world of practical religion in simply being considerate of others.
Roger Babson

It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
Francis Bacon

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
Mikhail Bakunin

Religion: a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce

My poor are my best patients. God pays for them.
Herman Boerhaave

Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

I coined a synonym for syncretism, namely syncretinism.
Carl William Brown

Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.
Phillips Brooks

And lips say “God be pitiful,” who never said, “God be praised.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.
Patrick Buchanan

All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. … The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.
Edmund Burke

One gives praise to God not only through prayers of thanksgiving, but also through obedience to His commandments and service to others, especially those less fortunate than ourselves.
George H. Bush )

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day…
Lord Byron

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

If religion is only human, and its form is man’s form, it follows that everything in religion is true.
Emile Auguste Chartier

Nowadays, besides being corrupted by stupidity, the Vatican is corrupted by syncretinism.
Carl William Brown

Religion! What treasure untold resides in that heavenly word!
William Cowper

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.
Benjamin Disraeli

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Serving God is doing good to man. But praying is thought an easier service and is therefore more generally chosen.
Benjamin Franklin

The Pope is none other than the president of that huge Vatican industry that has made the Catholic religion its great consumer product.
Carl William Brown

Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Northrop Frye

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place – social service – the ants creed, the bees creed.
John Galsworthy

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former — of the corruption of the will.
Alexander Herzen

It’s incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.
Edward Hoagland

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.
Thomas Hobbes

Religion is man’s twisted thinking, out of which temples are erected to realize it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Eric Hoffer

I do benefits for all religions – I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.
Bob Hope

Give us a religion that will help us to live – we can die without assistance.
Elbert Hubbard

The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammedanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
Victor Hugo

Syncretinism is the most updated keyword of the modern catholic church.
Carl William Brown

What shall I say, O Muslims, I know not myself, I am neither a Christian, nor a Jew, nor a Zoroastrian, nor a Muslim.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
Dean William R. Inge

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
William James

I have tried to keep things in my hands and lost them all, but what I have given into the Lord’s hands I still possess.
Martin Luther King Jr.

A man with God is always in the majority.
John Knox

Perdition shall be the lot of man, except for those who have faith and do good works and exhort each other to justice and fortitude.
The Koran

When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.
Karl Kraus

To what excesses will men not go for the sake of a religion in which they believe so little and which they practice so imperfectly!
Jean De La Bruyere

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
C. S. Lewis

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but innocence.
Christopher Marlowe

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The church burned my friend Giordano, and we don’t forget, we don’t forgive.
Carl William Brown

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.
Suzanne Lafollette

My religion is very simple, my religion is kindness.
Dalai Lama

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one’s religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
D. H. Lawrence

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.
Thomas B. Macaulay

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.
Joseph De Maistre

Even Voltaire said it: “If God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him!” And that’s exactly what our ancestors must have thought, too.
Carl William Brown

Quotes and aphorisms on religion

But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?
Harriet Martineau

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
Harriet Martineau

Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx

Archbishop – A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
H. L. Mencken

Thanksgiving is nothing if not a glad and reverent lifting of the heart to God in honor and praise for His goodness.
James R. Miller

Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it, ought to be treated as a common enemy.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind’s disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.
Gerard De Nerval

The Vatican has always been corrupted, first of all by stupidity.
Carl William Brown

From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.
John Henry Newman

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.
Reinhold Niebuhr

There’s no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
Sean O’Casey

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. And, the grace of God is the glue.
Eugene O’Neill

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Thomas Paine

If we want to discover what is true, we must be completely free from all religions, all conditioning, all dogmas, all beliefs, and any authority that pushes us to conform; essentially, to be completely alone, and that is very difficult.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.
Thomas Paine

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.
Blaise Pascal

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
Ezra Pound

A maker of idols is never an idolater.
Chinese Proverb

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.
Edgar Quinet

It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.
Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Salman Rushdie

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
Bertrand Russell

Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Marquis De Sade

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
George Santayana

It makes sense that there is no sense without God.
Edith Schaeffer

Progressive intellectuals spent decades of centuries freeing themselves from the imbecility of the Catholic religion, only to end up supporting the stupidity of Islam and its fanatical puppets.
Carl William Brown

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
George Bernard Shaw

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
George Bernard Shaw

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag

By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.
Gloria Steinem

If you have two religions in your country, they will cut each other’ throat; if you have thirty religions, they will live in peace.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
Allen Tate

Cast your cares on God; that anchor holds.
Lord Alfred Tennyson

Arguments about Scripture achieve nothing but a stomachache and a headache.
Tertullian

Call no man your father upon the earth, for one is your Father, which is in heaven.
The Holy Bible

Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.
The Holy Bible Source: Corinthians 4.2

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.
Paul Tillich

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.
Alexis De Tocqueville

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious — except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.
Mark Twain

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.
Mark Twain

A good test of a man’s religion is its vitality.
Author Unknown

Only happy people can learn. Only happy people can teach. Our religion should put a sparkle in our eyes and a tone in our voice, and a spring in our step that bears witness of our faith and confidence in the goodness of God.
Author Unknown

Buddhism believes in reincarnation, but this theory is unsuitable for the wise; in fact, it is better for so many imbeciles to remain in the realm of the dead.
Carl William Brown

Religion is a man using a divining rod. Philosophy is a man using a pick and shovel.
Author Unknown

Religion is insurance in this world against fire in the next.
Author Unknown

Religion is like holding on to a rock in the middle of a raging river; faith is learning how to swim.
Author Unknown

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
John Updike

When it comes to money, everyone is of the same religion.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine’s attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn’t prevent it being a religious ceremony.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion is love: in no case is it logic.
Beatrice Potter Webb

Can you tell a plain man the road to heaven? Certainly, turn at once to the right, then go straight forward.
William Wilberforce

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
Oscar Wilde

Don’t try to tear down other people’s religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it’s glories.
Brigham Young

By night an atheist half believes in God.
Edward Young

Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
Fred A. Allen

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.
William Blake

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty – necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.
James Baldwin

Humanity’s spiritual, metaphysical, mystical, literary, and sociological beliefs are also very useful in promoting those stupid wars, also more vulgarly called, of religion.
Carl William Brown

Aphorisms and quotes about religion

A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
Henry Ward Beecher

The test of Christian character should be that a man is a joy-bearing agent to the world.
Henry Ward Beecher

Christianity is art and not money. Money is its curse.
William Blake

Do you wish to find out the really sublime? Repeat the Lord’s Prayer.
Napoleon Bonaparte

How natural that the errors of the ancient should be handed down and, mixing with the principles and system which Christ taught, give to us an adulterated Christianity.
Olympia Brown

If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world’s.
Samuel Butler

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
Samuel Butler

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity; for the mere pleasure of fancying, I may be damned.
Lord Byron

Christianity is completed Judaism or it is nothing.
Benjamin Disraeli

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
Herb Caen

What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
Albert Camus

With two thousand years of Christianity behind him… a man can’t see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The question is not ”How much may I indulge in and still be saved. God forbid! I must rather ask, ”What about Christ’s will and the example I set for my fellow Christians?”
Robert A. Cook

I have now disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian religion.
Patrick Henry

If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.
Mahatma Gandhi

White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.
Nikki Giovanni

The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A real Christian is a person who can give his pet parrot to the town gossip.
Billy Graham

Being a Christian is more than just an instantaneous conversion; it is like a daily process whereby you grow to be more and more like Christ.
Billy Graham

Christianity is either relevant all the time or useless anytime. It is not just a phase of life; it is life itself.
Richard Halverson

It is only when all our Christian ancestors are allowed to become our contemporaries that the real splendor of the Christian faith and the Christian life begins to dawn upon us.
Lynn Harold Hough

The Christianity which is shared is the Christianity which is convincing.
Lynn Harold Hough

Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.
Samuel Johnson

God doesn’t have any grandchildren.
Eli Stanley Jones

Bear the Cross cheerfully and it will bear you.
Thomas a Kempis

The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
Rudyard Kipling

I believe in Christianity as I believe in the rising sun; not because I see it, but by it I can see all else.
C. S. Lewis

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
C. S. Lewis

Regardless of the day or the hour; whether in seeming good times or bad, the Christian lives in the world for the good of the world and for the sake of the world.
Harold Lindsell

Christian life consists of faith and charity.
Martin Luther

Christians are rare people on earth.
Martin Luther

No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham

A good example is far better than a good precept.
Dwight L. Moody

A rule I have had for years is: to treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal friend. His is not a creed, a mere doctrine, but it is He Himself we have.
Dwight L. Moody

Never think that Jesus commanded a trifle, nor dare to trifle with anything He has commanded.
Dwight L. Moody

There are many of us that are willing to do great things for the Lord, but few of us are willing to do little things.
Dwight L. Moody

He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that, though it is not true, it has been found necessary to invent it.
Hector Hugh Munro

Christianity makes suffering contagious.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche

What if men take to following where He leads, weary of mumbling Athanasian creeds?
Roden Noel

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.
Novalis

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell

To be like Christ is to be a Christian.
William Penn

Christianity is a battle not a dream.
Wendell Phillips

Many people profess Christianity. Very few live it – almost none. And when you live it people may think you’re crazy. It has been truthfully said that the world is equally shocked by one who repudiates Christianity as by one who practices it.
Peace Pilgrim

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.
Edgar Allan Poe

I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.
Alexander Pope

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
George Bernard Shaw

Faith makes a Christian. Life proves a Christian. Trial confirms a Christian. Death crowns a Christian.
Author Unknown

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.
Francis Schaeffer

Is your Christianity ancient history – or current events?
Samuel M. Shoemaker

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton

If you make a great deal of Christ, He will make a great deal of you; But it you make but little of Christ, He will make but little of you.
R. A. Torrey

The Christian’s chief occupational hazards are depression and discouragement.
John R. Stott

If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.
C. T. Studd

But seek first the kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.
The Holy Bible

Peter said, “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, [rise and] walk.”
The Holy Bible

Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out: an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy.
The Holy Bible

Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment and its wars.
Count Leo Tolstoy

Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God.
A. W. Tozer

Christianity, above all, has given a clear-cut answer to the demands of the human soul.
Author Unknown

Don’t feel superior just because you go to church, it doesn’t make you a Christian.
Author Unknown

One ABC of Christianity: “Always Be Cheerful”
Author Unknown

Christian means coming from Christ. Just as a Californian comes from California and a Bostonian is someone who comes from Boston, A Christian is one who comes from Christ.
Don Walk

The fear of hell, or aiming to be blest, savors too much of private interest.
Edmund Waller

A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.
Thomas Ybarra

The trouble with some of us is that we have been inoculated with small doses of Christianity which keep us from catching the real thing.
Leslie Weatherhead

The spirit of Christian liberality will strengthen as it is exercised.
Ellen G. While

Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan – spoiled.
Israel Zangwill

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination – everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.
John Adams )

Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
Robert Browning

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess

Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action – that the end will sanction any means.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A little skill in antiquity inclines a man to Popery.
Thomas Fuller

She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Today’s Catholic church seems to reward authoritarian personalities who are clearly ill, violent, sexually obsessed and unable to remember the past.
Matthew Fox

Catholics are necessarily at war with this age. That we are not more conscious of the fact, that we so often endeavor to make an impossible peace with it: that is the tragedy. You cannot serve God and .
Eric Gill

For support, I fall back on my heart. Has a man any fault a woman cannot weave with and try to change into something better, if the god her man prays to is a mother holding a baby?
Haniel Long

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
Thomas B. Macaulay

Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It’s a painful religion. We’re all gluttons for punishment.
Madonna

You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys.
Archbishop Paul Marcinkus

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
George Orwell

It is the custom of the Roman Church, which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye to some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law.
Pope Gregory VII

If you’re going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you’re going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.
Muriel Spark

Coming to Rome, much labor and little profit! The King whom you seek here, unless you bring Him with you will not find Him.
Author Unknown

The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is woman being treated either as a Madonna or a Mary Magdalene.
Shirley Williams

The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
Fred A. Allen

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God’s work.
Brooks Atkinson

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
Jane Austen

The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.
Henry Ward Beecher

The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.
Robert Mcafee Brown

The church exists to train its member through the practice of the presence of God to be servants of others, to the end that Christlikeness may become common property.
William Adams Brown

Wherever we find the Word of God surely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a church of God.
John Calvin

I believe with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ should be a Church of blurred edges.
George Carey

People have described me as a “management bishop” but I say to my critics, “Jesus was a management expert too.”
George Carey

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
Thomas Carlyle

A church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.
Henry Chadwick

An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.
William Cowper

A woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.
Mary Daly

And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny’s the worst.
Daniel Defoe

His creed no parson ever knew, for this was still his “simple plan,” to have with clergymen to do as little as a Christian can.
Sir Francis Doyle

There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.
Henry Fielding

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.
Peter T. Forsyth

Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves.
Thomas Fuller

Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.
Charles De Gaulle

Churchgoers are like coals in a fire. When they cling together, they keep the flame aglow; when they separate, they die out.
Billy Graham

It’s about time we quit playing church in these services that start at eleven o clock sharp and end at twelve o clock dull.
Vance Havner

Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave — with both ends kicked out.
Vance Havner

The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament, normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.
Vance Havner

What makes a church great in the eyes of God? Participation, proclamation, preservation, and propagation. Every church ought to exhibit all four.
O. S. Hawkins

I’m a priest, not a priestess. “Priestess” implies mumbo jumbo and all sorts of pagan goings-on. Those who oppose us would love to call us priestesses. They can call us all the names in the world – it’s better than being invisible.
Carter Heyward

But a priest’s life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one – pointed – a compass, not a weathercock.
Aldous Huxley

The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.
Robert Green Ingersoll

The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.
Lyndon B. Johnson )

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.
Samuel Johnson

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
James Joyce

Yes, I see the Church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.
Martin Luther

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H. L. Mencken

Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.
Dwight L. Moody

The difference between listening to a radio sermon and going to church…is almost like the difference between calling your girl on the phone and spending an evening with her.
Dwight L. Moody

The Christian church is a society of sinners. It is the only society in the world, membership in which is based upon the single qualification that the candidate shall be unworthy of membership.
Charles C. Morrison

The greatest hindrances to the evangelization of the world are those within the church.
John R. Mott

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
Iris Murdoch

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
L. L. Nash

Many are called but few are chosen. There are sayings of Christ which suggest that the Church he came to establish will always be a minority affair.
Edward Norman

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine

My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine

It would be far better to be of no church than to be bitter of any.
William Penn

Too hot to go to church? What about Hell?
Ohio, Poster in Dayton

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.
Ezra Pound

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Ezra Pound

He who is near the Church is often far from God.
French Proverb

Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.
Irish Proverb

In a small house God has His corner; in a big house, He has to stand in the hall.
Swedish Proverb

Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.
John Ruskin

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?
George Bernard Shaw

The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.
Charlie Shedd

How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is “I will see you in the vestry after service.”
Sydney Smith

I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Sydney Smith

The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.
John Spong

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
Robert Louis Stevenson

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
Jonathan Swift

A little, round, fat, oily man of God.
James Thomson

I think a bishop who doesn’t give offence to anyone is probably not a good bishop.
James Thomson

One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.
A. W. Tozer

A group touring Westminster Abbey in London heard the guide list the famous people buried within its walls. During a momentary silence a little old lady’s voice blurted out loud and clear, “Anybody been saved here lately?”
Author Unknown

The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.
Sir Henry Wotton

Though the church has many critics, it has no rivals.
Author Unknown

The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share.
Alice Walker

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
Simone Weil

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.
John Wesley

I don’t go to church; kneeling bags my nylons.
Billy Wilder

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
James Baldwin

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
Jimmy Carter

O unbelievers, I serve not what you serve and you are not serving what I serve, nor am I serving what you have served, neither are you serving what I serve. To you your religion, and to me my religion!
Qur’an

There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 % Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.
Theodore Roosevelt

If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!
Israel Zangwill

The Christian is not one who has gone all the way with Christ. None of us has. The Christian is one who has found the right road.
Charles L. Allen

Thinking as I do that the Creator of this world is a very cruel being, and being a worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: “the Son, O how unlike the Father!” First God Almighty comes with a thump on the head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.
William Blake

Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.
Phillips Brooks

A lot of people say to me, “Why did you kill Christ?” “I dunno… it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.” “We killed him because he didn’t want to become a doctor, that’s why we killed him.”
Lenny Bruce

I love to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of His shoe in the earth, there have I coveted to put mine also.
John Bunyan

Each eye can have its vision separately; but when we are looking at anything… our vision, which in itself is divided, joins up and unites in order to give itself as a whole to the object that is put before it.
John Calvin

None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.
Lydia M. Child

The Lord has turned all our sunsets into sunrise.
Clement of Alexandria

The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.
Denis Diderot

The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being… can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

To become Christ-like is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly and all lower achievement vain.
Henry Drummond

By a Carpenter mankind was made; and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.
Desiderius Erasmus

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.
Mahatma Gandhi

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.
Mikhail Gorbachev

No man ever loved like Jesus. He taught the blind to see and the dumb to speak. He died on the cross to save us. He bore our sins. And now God says, “Because He did, I can forgive you.”
Billy Graham

The men who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same.
Billy Graham

Jesus Christ is God’s everything for man’s total need.
Richard Halverson

Jesus Christ turns life right-side-up, and heaven outside-in.
Carl F. H. Henry

I wouldn’t put it past God to arrange a virgin birth if He wanted, but I very much doubt if He would.
David Jenkins

He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
James Joyce

No one else holds or has held the place in the heart of the world, which Jesus holds. Other gods have been as devoutly worshipped; no other man has been so devoutly loved.
John Knox

Jesus says, “I love you just the way you are. And I love you too much to let you stay the way you are.”
Chris Lyons

We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence and that the center of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary.
Alexander Maclaren

The greatest thing about any civilization is the human person, and the greatest thing about this person is the possibility of his encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.
Charles Malik

Jesus promised His disciples three things: that they would be entirely fearless, absurdly happy, and that they would get into trouble.
Russell W. Maltby

I believe in person to person. Every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment.
Mother Teresa

The word “Christianity” is already a misunderstanding — in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.
Friedrich Nietzsche

A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on him.
Ezra Pound

Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners.
Camille Paglia

Only Christ could have conceived Christ.
Joseph Parker

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal

God speaks to me not through the thunder and the earthquake, nor through the ocean and the stars, but through the Son of Man, and speaks in a language adapted to my imperfect sight and hearing.
William Lyon Phelps

Two thousand years ago there was One here on this earth who lived the grandest life that ever has been lived yet – a life that every thinking man, with deeper or shallower meaning, has agreed to call divine.
Frederick W. Robertson

Above all the grace and the gifts that Christ gives to his beloved is that of overcoming self.
St. Francis of Assisi

The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favor, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The name of Jesus is as ointment poured forth; It nourishes, and illumines, and stills the anguish of the soul.
Angelus Silesius

Jesus whom I know as my Redeemer cannot be less than God.
St. Athanasius

I am pretty sure that we err in treating these sayings as paradoxes. It would be nearer the truth to say that it is life itself which is paradoxical and that the sayings of Jesus are simply a recognition of that fact.
Thomas Taylor

I thank God for the honesty and virility of Jesus religion which makes us face the facts and calls us to take a man’s part in the real battle of life.
Henry Van Dyke

Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.
Simone Weil

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
James Baldwin

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
Dean William R. Inge

Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions.
Wright C. Mills

What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?
Edgar Quinet

All of our institutions must now turn their full attention to the great task ahead – to humanize our lives and thus to humanize our society.
James Perkins

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Henry David Thoreau

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Quotes and thoughts by Albert Einstein

Carl William Brown — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:51:26 +0000

Albert Einstein quotes and aphorisms

Quotes and thoughts by Albert Einstein, aphorisms, ideas and wise criticisms that demonstrate the greatness and humanity of this scientist and philosopher.

Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.
Albert Einstein

A human being is part of the whole we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He is convinced that he himself, his thoughts and feelings, are something independent of others, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. That illusion is a prison for us, limiting them to our personal desires and affection for the few closest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from that prison, widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.
Albert Einstein

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein

As long as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as long as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein

As long as there are men, there will be wars.
Albert Einstein

Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
Albert Einstein

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
Albert Einstein

Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.
Albert Einstein

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.
Albert Einstein

God is subtle but he is not malicious.
Albert Einstein

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein

Great minds have always encountered violent opposition from mediocrities, who cannot understand the man who rejects inherited prejudices, but uses his intelligence with honesty and courage.
Albert Einstein

Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.
Albert Einstein

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
Albert Einstein

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!
Albert Einstein

Human ethical conduct must be truly based on compassion, education, and social bonds, without recourse to any religious principle. Men would be pitiable if they were held back by the fear of punishment or the hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein

I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice.
Albert Einstein

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never hidden this belief of mine, on the contrary I have expressed it clearly. If there is anything in me that can be defined as a religious feeling, it is precisely that boundless admiration for the structure of the world within the limits in which science can reveal it to us.
Albert Einstein

I don’t believe at all in human freedom in the philosophical sense of the word. Everyone acts not only under the impulse of an external imperative, but also according to an internal necessity.
Albert Einstein

I prefer an attitude of humility that corresponds to the weakness of our intellectual capacity to understand the nature of our being.
Albert Einstein

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
Albert Einstein

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein

I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.
Albert Einstein

If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Albert Einstein

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein

In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein famous quote

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
Albert Einstein

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
Albert Einstein

Life is not worth living unless it is lived for someone else.
Albert Einstein

Mystery is the most beautiful thing we can experience. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
Albert Einstein

Never consider study as an obligation, but as an opportunity to delve into the beautiful and wonderful world of knowledge.
Albert Einstein

No, this trick won’t work… How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Albert Einstein

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. (Sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton)
Albert Einstein

One day machines will be able to solve all problems, but none of them will ever be able to pose a problem.
Albert Einstein

Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
Albert Einstein

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.
Albert Einstein

Science will stagnate if it is made to serve practical goals.
Albert Einstein

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein

Science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein

Science is the attempt to reconcile the chaotic diversity of our sensory experience with a logically uniform system of thought.
Albert Einstein

Schopenhauer’s aphorism, “It is true that a man can do what he wants, but he can only want what he wants,” has deeply impressed me since my youth; in the whirlwind of events and trials imposed by life’s harshness, those words have always been a comfort to me and an inexhaustible source of tolerance. Awareness of this helps soften the sense of responsibility that easily mortifies us and prevents us from taking ourselves and others too seriously; it leads us to a view of life that leaves a singular place for humor.
Albert Einstein

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
Albert Einstein

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
Albert Einstein

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.
Albert Einstein

The gift of imagination has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
Albert Einstein

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
Albert Einstein

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Albert Einstein

The important thing is to not stop questioning.
Albert Einstein

The intelligent man solves problems. The wise man avoids them. The stupid man creates them. And if the world is full of problems, there must be a reason.
Albert Einstein

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein

The only real valuable thing is intuition.
Albert Einstein

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
Albert Einstein

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Albert Einstein

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein

The thing about smart people is they sound like crazy people to stupid people.
Albert Einstein

The situation of us mortals is truly singular. Each of us is on this earth for a brief visit; we don’t know why, but very often we believe we understand. We don’t reflect deeply and limit ourselves to considering one aspect of daily life; we are here for other men: first of all for those on whose smiles and well-being our happiness depends, but also for that multitude of strangers to whose fate a bond of sympathy binds us. This is my constant daily thought: external and internal life depends on the work of contemporaries and that of predecessors; I must strive to give them, in equal measure, what I have received and what I still receive. I feel the need to lead a simple life and am often painfully aware that I ask more of the activity of my fellow men than is necessary. I realize that social class differences are unjustified and that, ultimately, they have their foundation in violence; but I also believe that a modest life is suitable for everyone, for body and spirit.
Albert Einstein

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein

The mystical beliefs of our time, manifested in the growing wave of what is known as philosophy and spiritualism, are to me nothing more than a symptom of weakness and confusion.
Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein quotes and ideas

The most precious things in life are not those that money can buy.
Albert Einstein

Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.
Albert Einstein

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.
Albert Einstein

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
Albert Einstein

War is not a parlor game in which everyone plays by the rules. When life and death are at stake, rules and obligations go out the window. Only a total rejection of war can be of any use.
Albert Einstein

What is the meaning of our existence, what is the significance of the existence of all living beings in general? Knowing how to answer such a question means having religious sentiments. You will say: but does it make sense to ask this question? I answer you: anyone who believes that his own life and that of his fellow men is meaningless is not only unhappy, but barely capable of living.
Albert Einstein

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
Albert Einstein

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
Albert Einstein

Without “ethical culture”, there is no salvation for humanity.
Albert Einstein

Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.
Albert Einstein

Blessed Virgin Mary and Rosa Mystica

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Hildegard of Bingen, Creativity and Writing

Carl William Brown — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:33:54 +0000

Hildegard of Bingen, Creativity and Writing

Hildegard of Bingen, Creativity and Writing. An article that traces the life, works, and intellectual and religious commitment of an extraordinary woman.

In memory of Sister Iginia, the choirmaster in which my young mother, Innocenza, sang.

Recte scire, recte agere. Bernardus Claravallensis – De laude novae militiae ad Milites Templi.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was an extraordinarily multifaceted figure of the Middle Ages, whose creative genius and writing stemmed from a profound mystical-visionary experience. Named a Doctor of the Church, she combined theology, music, herbalism, and writing, leaving a legacy that continues to inspire.

Here are the key aspects of her creativity and written output:

Writing as Vision and Revelation

The Creative Spark: For Hildegard, all knowledge, whether musical or written, was born from a vision, described as “the flaming light” that flooded her brain and chest, not in a dream but in full consciousness.
Creative Obedience: In 1141, at the age of 42, she received an injunction from a “Vox de Cielo” (Voice from Heaven) to write down what she saw and heard. This marked the beginning of her literary production, despite her self-described “fragile being.”
Major Works: Among her major works are the Scivias (Know the Ways), the Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works), and the Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations.

Creativity and Linguistic Innovation

Lingua Ignota: Hildegard is known for creating one of the first documented artificial languages, the Lingua Ignota (“unknown language”), composed of a 23-letter alphabet (ignotae litterae), likely used for mystical and liturgical purposes.
Theological Creativity: Her writing is distinguished by its ability to rework theology in a symbolic and prophetic manner, describing the universe and its relationship with the divine through iridescent and poetic images.

Writing Themes and Artistic Production

Poetry and Music: She composed sacred hymns, orations, and the Ordo Virtutum, a liturgical musical drama that combines theology and artistic creativity.
Science and Nature (Viriditas): She wrote treatises on medicine and natural sciences (Physica and Causae et Curae), describing the properties of herbs and the life force she called Viriditas (verdant force), uniting creativity with healing.
Epistles: She wrote numerous spiritual and political letters, addressing popes and emperors such as Frederick Barbarossa.

A Model of Feminine Creativity

Hildegard imposed her wise voice in a male-dominated age, founding monasteries and preaching publicly, an extraordinary feat for the 12th century. Her holistic approach, uniting body and soul, music and healing, made her a model of conscious creativity ahead of its time.

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) is the patron saint of musicians, writers, and natural scientists, recognized for her immense contributions as a German Benedictine abbess, composer, philosopher, and mystic. Canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI and named a Doctor of the Church, she is celebrated for uniting faith, creativity, and science.

Key aspects of St. Hildegard of Bingen:

Patronage: She is widely regarded as the patron saint of musicians, writers, and natural scientists due to her creative and scientific work.
Musical Legacy: Known for composing liturgical music, including the Ordo Virtutum, a notable early morality play. Her music is characterized by monophonic melodies.
Writings and Medicine: She documented her spiritual visions in books like Scivias and authored medical texts concerning natural remedies and healing.
“Green Power”: She believed in viriditas, or “greening power,” connecting God to the creativity and vitality of nature.
Feast Day: Her feast day is celebrated on September 17.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen

She is a prominent figure for artists and thinkers, embodying a holistic approach to spirituality and creativity.

Reason is the root through which the resonant word blossoms.
Hildegard of Bingen

There is the music of Heaven in all things.
Hildegard of Bingen

The human soul is “symphonic”; music is part of the profound nature.
Hildegard of Bingen

Sed et anima hominis symphoniam in se habet et symphonizans est, unde etiam multotiens plantus educit, cum symphoniam audit, quoniam de patria in exilium se missam meminit. (But the soul of man also has a symphony within itself and is a symphonist, from which it often also generates plants when it hears a symphony, because it remembers having been sent into exile from its homeland..)
Hildegard von Bingen

Dare to declare who you are. It’s not far from the shores of silence at the edge of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk it, you must be ready to leap.
Hildegard of BingenMusic and Audio

We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not hope. Part of the terror lies in reclaiming our ability to listen, in using our voice, in seeing our light.
Hildegard of Bingen

The soul is the life force that invigorates the flesh, for the body grows and thrives through it, just as the earth becomes fertile when moistened. The soul moistens the body so that it does not dry out, just as rain seeps into the earth.
Hildegard of Bingen

We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not hope. Part of the terror is reclaiming our ability to listen, using our voice, seeing our light… Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence at the edge of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk it, you must be ready to leap.
Hildegard of Bingen

A woman of many talents, she was also a prophetess, healer, herbalist, naturalist, cosmologist, gemologist, philosopher, artist, poet, playwright, musician, linguist, and political advisor. She was consulted for advice and assistance by many eminent figures of her time, such as Frederick Barbarossa, Philip of Alsace, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and Eugene III.

They walled her up alive, not metaphorically, but for real. A little girl locked in a stone cell, behind a gate, destined never to emerge. That little girl was Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – September 17, 1179), also known as Hildegard of Bingen or “Sibyl of the Rhine,” one of the most extraordinary figures of the Middle Ages. She was born, the youngest of ten children, in Bermersheim vor der Höhe, near Alzey, in Rhenish Hesse, in the summer of 1098, a year before the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem. She should have disappeared into the silence of a medieval monastery, but instead she became one of the most extraordinary minds of the Middle Ages: a mystic, philosopher, composer, naturalist, healer, advisor to popes and emperors. A woman who spoke when women were asked only to remain silent, and it all began in a locked cell.

At eight years old, she was locked up by her own family. This was supposed to be her end, but instead she became a voice that, centuries later, still burns. This child will not live long, they told her mother. She is a girl, and that alone makes her superfluous. Her body is fragile, her mind is burning. In the twelfth century, a child like Hildegard von Bingen is not a gift, she is a problem. She is too weak for marriage, unsuitable for domestic life. Her family doesn’t know what to do with her, so they choose the simplest and cruelest solution: seclusion. A locked room, a gate, and away they go. She is entrusted to Jutta von Sponheim, a young noblewoman who lives as a recluse at Disibodenberg Abbey.

Little Hildegard grew up in that almost walled-off cell, in a form of spiritual confinement we can barely even imagine today. There, she learned early that crying was pointless. That feeling too much was a sin. But in that very cell, something unexpected happened. From childhood, Hildegard recounted having luminous visions, interior experiences that accompanied her throughout her life. For years, she kept them secret, fearing she would be judged mad or possessed. Meanwhile, she studied, listened, learned Latin, the liturgy, and the Scriptures. This was how her life should have ended: a prisoner in a cage others had chosen for her. But not so. Little by little, something inside her rebelled.

From a very young age, she showed signs of fragile health and mystical visions (as early as 3-5 years old). As I mentioned, at around the age of 8, she was entrusted to Jutta von Sponheim, a recluse at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, where she received a basic religious education. She professed as a Benedictine nun around the age of 14-15. Upon Jutta’s death (1136), she became superior of the small female community. In 1141 he fell seriously ill and had a great visionary experience which he interpreted as a divine command to write down and spread what he saw: from there was born his main work, the Scivias («Know the Ways»), completed around 1151 and approved by Pope Eugene III thanks also to the interest of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a French Cistercian monk, a mystic of enormous influence, considered the main spiritual innovator of the 12th century, a charismatic theologian, a very powerful preacher and leader of the Second Crusade, a figure who left a profound mark both on Christian spirituality and on the ecclesiastical politics of his time.

For many years, Hildegard had visions but refused to write them down. According to her accounts, everything changed when she became seriously ill. She interpreted her illness as a divine sign: she was resisting the mission entrusted to her. Only when she began writing her great book, Scivias, did she say the illness disappeared. For her, this was proof that she had to speak out. She also wrote hundreds of letters to powerful figures of the time, including Frederick I Barbarossa and Pope Eugene III. In these letters, she was far from shy; on the contrary, she rebuked the powerful when she thought they were governing poorly, something almost unthinkable for a woman in the 12th century.

The visions Hildegard described are incredibly rich in cosmic imagery. Her book Scivias features egg-shaped universes, circles of fire, human figures within cosmic structures, and currents of energy flowing through the world. Many modern scholars have noted that some of these images are strikingly reminiscent of modern cosmological representations. Of course, Hildegard wasn’t practicing science in the current sense, but her symbolic ability was extraordinary. She herself wrote that the visions came as a “living light” that showed her the structure of the world.

There is, in fact, a very interesting theory, discussed by various modern scholars, according to which Hildegard von Bingen’s visions could also have a neurological explanation. This doesn’t mean reducing her mystical experience to an illness, but rather trying to understand how the phenomenon worked from a medical perspective. Some neurologists have carefully observed the images contained in her book Scivias and other works. Many of the figures she describes are highly distinctive: intense, pulsating lights, concentric luminous circles, sparkling shapes, jagged lines crossing the visual field. These phenomena are very reminiscent of what in neurology are called migraine auras.

During some forms of migraine with aura, people see bright sparks, glowing zigzags, geometric shapes, and distorted visual fields. Scholars have noted that some medieval illustrations of Hildegard’s visions are remarkably similar to modern depictions of these neurological phenomena. According to this hypothesis, Hildegard may have had a special neurological sensitivity that produced these intense visual experiences. But the truly extraordinary thing isn’t the phenomenon itself. It’s what she did with it. Many people have migraine with aura. Almost no one transforms those images into a cosmological system, a theological work, or a symbolic vision of the universe, yet Hildegard succeeded in transforming those inner experiences into thought, art, and knowledge.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen

She described the experience this way: she saw an intense light that she called lux vivens, the “living light.” She also said something very interesting: the visions did not cause her to lose consciousness. She wrote that she saw them “with her inner eyes,” remaining fully lucid. This detail has greatly intrigued modern scholars. A mind beyond the ordinary, and whatever the explanation – mystical, symbolic, or neurological – one thing is certain: Hildegard von Bingen’s mind was extraordinary. She managed to combine in a single person: spirituality, natural science, medicine, music, and philosophy. And all this starting with a little girl whom her own family had decided to lock up in a cell.

One of the most curious aspects is that Hildegard also invented her own language, called Lingua Ignota. It was a kind of symbolic language with new words, probably designed to express spiritual concepts that Latin could not express. It is one of the earliest known examples of an artificial language in European history. Hildegard also composed dozens of sacred songs, collected in the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum. Surprisingly, her music is very different from traditional Gregorian chant: it has much broader, almost ecstatic melodic lines. Her music is still performed today in concerts and on modern recordings.

At forty, having become the leader of the small monastic community, Hildegard made a radical gesture for a woman of her time: she took up a pen and wrote. Thus was born Scivias, the book of her visions. The title means Scito vias Domini – “Know the ways of the Lord.” It is an extraordinary text: theology, cosmology, symbolism, powerful images that recount creation, the destiny of man, the struggle between light and darkness. When the manuscript reaches Pope Eugene III, something no one could have foreseen happens. The Pope is struck by the power of that female voice and, during the Synod of Trier, officially authorizes Hildegard to write and spread her visions.

It was an extraordinary moment: a twelfth-century woman received public recognition for teaching, and from that moment Hildegard never stopped. She wrote theological works, medical treatises, and natural sciences such as Physica and Causae et Curae. She studied the properties of plants, minerals, and the human body. She composed music – hundreds of liturgical chants – collected in the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum, one of the most original musical works of the Middle Ages. She traveled and preached publicly, a rare feat for a woman of the time. Music and audio

She founded new monasteries, including Rupertsberg Monastery. She wrote to popes, emperors, and bishops, even admonishing Frederick I Barbarossa when she believed power was deviating from justice. And in her works, she championed a surprisingly modern idea: men and women are not meant to dominate each other, but to complement each other. She essentially restored women’s spiritual dignity in an era that rarely recognized it. Thus, the little girl everyone thought was too fragile – the one they had locked behind bars – became one of the most extraordinary minds of the Middle Ages.

Hildegard was a true polymath of the 12th century: a mystic and theologian (three great visionary works: Scivias, Liber Vitae Meritorum, Liber Divinorum Operum), a composer (she created the largest corpus of music by a single medieval author, including the Ordo Virtutum, considered the first musical “moral play” in history), a writer of scientific and medical texts (Physica and Causae et Curae, fundamental to medieval knowledge of herbs, minerals, and body care), and a political and religious advisor (she wrote letters to popes, emperors, bishops, and kings, not hesitating to openly criticize corruption and abuse). It is also noteworthy that Hildegard was so famous in the Middle Ages that even emperors and popes awaited her letters. Some are incredibly harsh and almost seem to have been written by a modern reformer.

For many years Hildegard lived in the male monastery of Disibodenberg Abbey, where she led a small community of nuns. At a certain point she had a very clear conviction: her nuns should have an independent monastery. The problem was that the abbot absolutely did not want to let them go. The nuns were noble and brought prestige and donations to the monastery. According to the chronicles, Hildegard reacted in a surprising way. She fell into a kind of sudden paralysis and declared it a divine sign: God would not allow her to move until the monastery accepted her request. Eventually the monks gave in, and so Hildegard founded her own independent female monastery in Rupertsberg, near Bingen around 1150 (where she moved with her nuns despite much opposition), and later founded a second one in Eibingen (1165). It was a remarkable victory: a woman who challenged male monastic authority and won.

Toward the end of her life, an even more incredible episode occurred. Hildegard permitted the burial in her monastery of a man who had previously been excommunicated but who, she believed, had reconciled with God before his death. The local church authorities disagreed and so ordered something drastic: the body must be exhumed. Hildegard, however, refused to obey, and not only did she conceal the exact location of the burial, so that no one could find the tomb. The Church’s response was harsh: the monastery was placed under an interdict, a ban on celebrating the liturgy and even singing, which for a monastic community was a very serious punishment. Hildegard, however, wrote such a forceful theological defense that the church authorities were eventually forced to revoke the punishment, and thus a nun won a confrontation with the highest authority in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Besides being a mystic and theologian, Hildegard was also a scholar of nature and health. In her treatises Physica and Causae et Curae, she described hundreds of natural remedies, medicinal plants, minerals, and observations of the human body. For the 12th century, she was something extraordinary: a woman who systematized medical knowledge. But the most surprising thing is that some of her ideas seem very modern. Hildegard insisted on a principle that is almost obvious today but was far from obvious in the Middle Ages: food can be medicine. Among the foods she most frequently recommended was spelt, which she considered one of the healthiest grains for the human body. She wrote that spelt “gives good blood and a happy mind.” Today we know it is rich in fiber, vitamins, and minerals.

The importance of balance between body and mind is another fundamental aspect of her interpretations. For Hildegard, many illnesses stemmed from an imbalance between body, emotions, and spirit. She used a central concept in her natural philosophy: viriditas – a Latin word meaning more or less vital force, green vitality, energy of life. According to her, health depended on the presence of this vital energy in the body and in nature. When viriditas is extinguished, illness arises. This vision is strikingly similar to many modern psychosomatic concepts.

In her treatise Physica, she described dozens of medicinal plants. For example, fennel aids digestion, sage strengthens the body, nettle is an energizing food, and lemon balm calms the heart and mind. Many of these uses are still recognized today in phytotherapy. A medicine that focuses on the individual, not just the disease. Perhaps most interestingly, Hildegard didn’t just look at the symptom; she believed the doctor should consider the person’s character, diet, emotions, and rhythm of life. In other words, a holistic view of health—a concept that has become very present in contemporary medicine.

She died on September 17, 1179, in Rupertsberg, at the age of 81. She had been venerated as a saint since the Middle Ages, although formal canonization only came in 2012, when Pope Benedict XVI also proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church, one of the highest titles in the Catholic tradition and one that only a very few women in history have received as recognition, and the patron saint of musicians and writers, celebrated annually on September 17. Today, she is admired both for her spiritual depth and for her extraordinary contribution to music, natural science, theology, and the intellectual emancipation of women in the Middle Ages.

In short, locked away as a child because she was deemed too fragile, Hildegard of Bingen became one of the most extraordinary minds of the Middle Ages. A mystic, composer, philosopher, naturalist, and healer, she spoke to popes, challenged emperors, wrote books, founded monasteries, and studied nature and the human body, demonstrating that sometimes history tries to silence certain voices, but those voices are precisely those destined to change the world. They cannot be extinguished, but are born and developed to demonstrate to everyone that profound commitment and tenacious self-belief can make us shine and thus illuminate our humanity.

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