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Thoughts about travelling

Carl William Brown — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:23:25 +0000

Meditations on travelling

Thoughts about travelling

Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey

The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.
Arnold Bennett

This book is nothing more than a pilgrim’s journey towards the sanctuary of stupidity, he is not in good company, which is why he listens to the advice of the wise men of the past and a bit of rebellious and melancholy music. The pitfalls are many, but he is not afraid, he is not a venerator, nor even a flatterer, on the contrary, he is a destroyer.
Carl William Brown

Tourism, a female phenomenon (or of unfeminined males): evasion, but above all digression and dispersion, spreading one’s interests (rather than concentrating them) and therefore being reduced to having no real ones. A tactile-motor stimulus, capable of producing numbness or dizziness that continues even after the occasion has ceased. Another way, perhaps, of “alienating”, of dispossessing oneself.
Guido Morselli

Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.
D. H. Lawrence

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
Henry David Thoreau

Thoughts about travelling

Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives – from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango – with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists’ stage.
Daniel J. Boorstin

I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
Lord Byron

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey’s fits and starts, rehearses life’s own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.
Jonathan Raban

The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.
Daniel J. Boorstin

It must be said of traveling that it arouses new ideas in those who already have many, but on the contrary it extinguishes the few in those who have few. It serves to awaken the notion of the infinite variety of life, with many living beings, many customs, many places, many sufferings, etc. etc. However, not in travel, but only in the solitude of meditation is it possible to discover the depth of life.
Romano Amerio

Thoughts on travels

Objective truth in politics has a rather labile value and incredibly blurred boundaries. Here’s an example. In the great Russia of the pseudo-communist government, a party hierarch during a conference was praising the magnificent progress of a certain locality in the country, when suddenly a listener from the audience spoke up and stated in amazement: “Truly I have been in the places that you have described, but I don’t seem to have noticed all this great progress!”; to which the official’s prompt response was: “Dear comrade, you travel too much and at the same time read Pravda too little.” Pravda, which in Russian means “truth”, was obviously the official organ of the Russian Communist Party.
Carl William Brown

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
Soren Kierkegaard

The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.
Paul Goodman

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
Nadine Gordimer

Of journeying the benefits are many: the freshness it bringeth to the heart, the seeing and hearing of marvelous things, the delight of beholding new cities, the meeting of unknown friends, and the learning of high manners.
Sadi Gulistan

Some end up corrupting themselves through long journeys, losing what little religion they had left; from one day to the next they see a new cult, different customs, different ceremonies. They resemble those who enter shops, undecided about the choice of fabrics they want to buy; the large number of those that are shown to them leaves them even more indeterminate, each of them having its own attraction and its own convenience: they cannot resolve themselves, they leave without having bought anything.
Jean de La Bruyère

Thoughts and reflections about travelling

When you travel you experience the act of Rebirth in a much more concrete way. You find yourself faced with completely new situations, the day passes more slowly and, in most cases, you don’t understand the language that others speak. This is exactly what happens to a baby just born from the mother’s womb.
Paulo Coelho

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Mark Twain

You don’t need to travel long distances to get answers or experience emotions. If we were authentic in our way of thinking, we would not need to travel a long way because it is a journey that follows the uncertain path of a dream that often leads to desolate areas. The true goal of life is to be able to be at peace with ourselves.
Romano Battaglia

Just as the human race, in blaming present things, praises past things, so the majority of travellers, while travelling, are lovers of their native sojourn, and prefer it with a kind of anger to those where they find themselves. Having returned to their native place, with the same anger they postpone it to all the other places where they have been.
Giacomo Leopardi

Nothing is beautiful and interesting if it does not attract tourists. Training the tourist, controlling the tourist, directing the tourist, is a secret and ruthless science. If Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini, Borromini and all the great artists had known that the recipient of their works would be tourists, perhaps they would have given up. If the tourist disappeared, the world economy would stall. The tourist is sacred, new cults and new rites are celebrated for him.
Fausto Gianfranceschi

The pleasure of travelling

After the gods had visited our planet, seeing what it was like, they decided to leave as soon as possible, but in order not to have made the journey in vain, they decided that they could give us a gift, or rather, they decided that they could unload an uncomfortable burden for their Olympus, and so it was that they left us as a memory the most stupid and stubborn goddess, ignorance; now it’s up to man to chase her back to Olympus; but the matter is not at all simple.
Carl William Brown

Traveling for profit is encouraged; travel for survival is condemned, much to the delight of traffickers of “illegal immigrants” and in spite of occasional and ephemeral waves of horror and indignation provoked by the sight of “economic emigrants” who ended up suffocated or drowned in the vain attempt to reach land capable of feed them.
Zygmunt Bauman

Travelers are divided into five degrees: those of the first and lowest degree are those who travel and who are seen traveling – they actually “are travelled” and are, so to speak, blind; the latter are the ones who really see the world; third parties have experiences as a result of seeing; the fourth ones relive the experiences they have had within themselves and take them away with them; finally there are some men of maximum strength who must ultimately also necessarily relive outside of themselves, in actions and works, everything they have seen – after experiencing it and experiencing it internally, as soon as they return home. Similar to these five categories of travelers all men generally go throughout the entire pilgrimage of life, the lowest as mere liabilities, the highest as those who act and die without any unused residue of intimate facts.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Our planet is nothing more than a spaceship groping in the cosmic void of the universe, and it is perhaps precisely for this reason that the most far-sighted are already thinking about the possibility that ultragalactic travel could one day allow us to abandon it without regrets. For the moment, however, the only agency that allows these non-return tours still remains the good old funeral home and the most advanced astronauts still remain, despite ourselves, the atavistic and friendly gravediggers.
Carl William Brown

It is said that Socrates, when someone complained that he had received no benefit from his travels, said to him: «It is natural that it should be so; you traveled in your own company.” Oh, how much it would benefit some people if they could get away from themselves! In reality they are oppressed by themselves, they worry, they damage themselves, they are dismayed. What good is it to cross the seas and go from city to city? If you want to escape the evils that beset you, you must not go to another place; you must be another man.
Lucius Anneus Seneca

We take everything we are with us on the journey. We carry the home of our soul with us, as a turtle does with its shell. In truth, the journey through the countries of the world is a symbolic journey for man. Everywhere he goes it is his own soul that he is looking for. This is why man must be able to travel.
Andrej Tarkovskij

Reflections about travelling

Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel – movement through space – provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions – perhaps one of the secret terrors – of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.
Daniel J. Boorstin

I have not often seen more natural acting than that of these masks. It is such acting as can only be sustained by a remarkably happy talent and long practice. While I am writing this, they are making a tremendous noise on the canal under my window, though it is past midnight. Whether for good or for evil, they are always doing something.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Good literature makes us travel everywhere, dreams and imagination become foresight and memory at the same time, the past becomes present, and the future past, and through the mythical arcana of thought we go away from these murky meanders, leaving the our beloved politicians on this earth to rot with those who have faith in them.
Carl William Brown

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
Charles Baudelaire

I have spent the day well just looking and looking. It is the same in art as in life. The deeper one penetrates, the broader grows the view.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.
Don Delillo

The experience of travelling

He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected.
Samuel Johnson

A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.
Milan Kundera

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.
John Steinbeck

I feel lost in Berlin. It has no resemblance to the city I had supposed it was. There was once a Berlin which I would have known, from descriptions in books–the Berlin of the last century and the beginning of the present one: a dingy city in a marsh, with rough streets, muddy and lantern-lighted, dividing straight rows of ugly houses all alike, compacted into blocks as square and plain and uniform and monotonous and serious as so many dry-goods boxes. But that Berlin has disappeared. It seems to have disappeared totally, and left no sign. The bulk of the Berlin of today has about it no suggestion of a former period. The site it stands on has traditions and a history, but the city itself has no traditions and no history. It is a new city; the newest I have ever seen. Chicago would seem venerable beside it; for there are many old-looking districts in Chicago, but not many in Berlin. The main mass of the city looks as if it had been built last week, the rest of it has a just perceptibly graver tone, and looks as if it might be six or even eight months old.
Mark Twain

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Quotes and ideas on vacation

The post Thoughts about travelling first appeared on The World of English.

Thoughts and reflections on vacation

Carl William Brown — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:53:45 +0000

Thoughts and reflections on vacation

Thoughts and reflections on vacation, some meditations on this summer popular topic by different and famous authors, writers and artists to enrich our holidays. What’s more don’t forget to visit pour main page on Tourism and travels. There you can take a tour around the world learning about culture, traditions, curiosities, towns, lakes, mountains, best hotels, magnificent cruises, links, photos and videos by English-culture.com

Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony – this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.
Jean Baudrillard

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
John Kenneth Galbraith

More than just yearly rituals in which we connect with friends and family, vacations are also exercises in self-definition. In affording time away from the demands of everyday life, vacations disclose what people choose to do rather than are required to do.
Cindy Sondik Aron

Sometimes a vacation helps restore peace in families. But you have to find the right method. My brother did this: after a whole year spent sticking together with his wife, he said: «Carme’, this year I want to take a healthy vacation». «Genna’, and how do you take a healthy vacation?» «Say hello to us here, we’ll catch up on the way back!»
Alessandro Siani

Vacations are designed to refresh the outlook of everyone. No matter how tired they may be when they return to work, vacationers have been refreshed emotionally and intellectually. Their effectiveness in their job has probably improved, and they are, generally speaking, better employees for the time off.
Robert J. Fischer

Reflections on vacation

What distinguishes a true samurai from other characters is that the original fighter always walks with death at his side and always trains, with his mind above all, instead of going on vacation, even when it’s a holiday.
Carl William Brown

[My wife and I] argued and butted heads for a while, and finally decided that it would be better to take a vacation or get a divorce. We discussed it calmly, like mature people, and we decided to get a divorce because we could only spend so much. And besides, a vacation in Bermuda lasts two weeks, whereas a divorce lasts a lifetime.
Woody Allen

These young people lack neither character nor good aptitude nor diligence: but they have not been given time to give themselves direction, rather they have been accustomed, from childhood, to receive direction. When they were mature enough to be “sent into the desert”, something else was done instead – they were used, they were alienated from themselves, they were educated to be used daily, they created for them a theory of duties out of all this – and now they cannot do without it and do not want anything else. The fact remains that these poor draft animals cannot be refused “holidays” – as this ideal of idleness of a century exhausted by too much work is called: in which it is permitted for once to abandon oneself to laziness and to become stupid and childish at one’s pleasure.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Every year, at the beginning of summer, we read learned analyses of staggered holidays, “hit and run” vacations, reasonable departures (intelligent, it seems excessive). Then comes Ferragosto and everything is as usual: people, if they can, don’t stay at home. We bite, yes, but only if they don’t let us escape along crowded highways. It’s not clear whether we are forced (closed offices, shops too), or instead we love the collective ritual and its barbaric aspects: crowds, queues, waiting, suffering and complaints.
Beppe Severgnini

I never went on vacation with my father, also because my father spent his vacations, about fifteen days in August, painting the apartment under the watchful, attentive and slightly annoying guidance of my mother. Those were the years of the economic boom in Italy, but in our house there was very little money going around. Later we could also go on vacation, and in fact on some occasions both my mother and I had taken vacations, but my father never, by now he had gotten used to it and didn’t even miss it. Now I don’t remember those August months of so many years ago very well, but one thing I know for sure, they were the best times of my life.
Carl William Brown

When it comes to the summer months most people start to think about where they will be going on vacation. This is the time of year when most individuals take time off of work because the kids are out of school. It is the perfect time for everyone to spend time together and to regroup from the stress that is often experienced with everyday life.
Cindy Crawford

The current Western concept of holidays is as ferocious as the very concept of work, not only because it interferes profoundly with the sense of freedom, but because it transforms and distorts its meaning. During the holidays, millions of people are forced to have fun, just as during the rest of the year they are forced to work tirelessly, to dream of finding a job or to recover from breakdowns and illnesses, caused by forced and daily work activity.
Silvano Agosti

I really love visiting cities of art on vacation. On vacation I go looking for asphalt like a pointer dog looks for a pheasant. What’s better than Madrid in August? Maybe Ibiza in August, but you have to be normal. Instead of a pedal boat, the subway. Instead of a walk by the sea, the queue in front of the museum. Instead of a fresh coconut, a hot orangeade. Then I go home pretty gaunt, but with a brain like that. And double the two bullshit.
Luciana Littizzetto

Different opinions on vacation

Capitalist societies first reduce a lot of people to poverty and then they commission sociologists and statistics professors to do research on poverty and that’s how we discover that the poor generally don’t have much money, they are numerous, they are usually poorly educated, although not always, they generally come from poor areas of the territory and so on, they spend little, they go to the theater little, they don’t go on vacation, they are vulgar, they wash little, and so on and so forth.
Carl William Brown

Luckily, every year, the holidays arrive, right on time. So we can get rid of those tired eyes of a hen struggling to lay an egg, that color of ice cream licked by a child, with all the flavors mixed together. And, with the holidays, comes the time to cast off. Unplug. Find peace. In the summer, all I want to do is sit on a deckchair and stay there. Still. I want the only thing that moves in me to be the dandruff. And if someone asks me: “What are you doing tonight?”, I already have the answer ready: “Nothing. At most I’ll peel the peppers”.
Luciana Littizzetto

On paper, vacations are always great. They’re supposed to save your marriage, get you healthy, promote world peace, make your skin glow again… The truth is, if you do them right, they’re worse than work. They’re like a cruise with diarrhea. You spend a lot of money sleeping in airports, lugging suitcases that weigh twice as much as you do, eating food that’s impossible to identify, and entrusting your safety to people you’ve never met before.
Erma Bombeck

Every “employee” has one. They are evil clouds that hide behind the mountains for up to 12 months, but when they realize that their man is about to go on vacation, they fall on his head, unloading a square of hail on the back of his neck in a meter by meter and accompany him relentlessly.
Paolo Villaggio

Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Susan Sontag

I am an absolute libertarian, and I think that every restriction is a limit to the healthy economic progress of humanity, for this reason I would not only prohibit murderers from going to prison, buildings that among other things I would immediately abolish, together with all those sordid characters that animate the world of politics and justice, but I would also give them a nice prize. Maybe a prize vacation in China, why not?
Carl William Brown

Oh, why can’t we break away from all this, just you and I, and lodge with my fleas in the hills? I mean, flee to my lodge in the hills.
S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone, and Arthur Sheekman

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks’ vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Various ideas on vacation

If you go on holiday by motorbike, things take on a completely different aspect. In a car you are always in a cockpit; you are used to it and you do not realize that everything you see from that window is nothing but an extra dose of TV. You are a passive observer and the landscape passes by you boringly inside a frame. On a motorbike the frame is no longer there. You have complete contact with everything. You are not a spectator, you are in the scene, and the feeling of presence is overwhelming.
Robert Maynard Pirsig

Some scholars argue that the energy needed for a fortnight’s vacation is equivalent to that consumed in two months of work. On the other hand, what is spent in a fortnight’s vacation corresponds to what is earned in two months of work.
Eros Drusiani

Seeing some of my acquaintances in the mountains during the Christmas holidays, memories of the good old days of university come to mind, when I had to work on holidays, always, while many of my classmates went to have fun, in the summer to the seaside, and in the winter to the snow!
Carl William Brown

Vacations have become somewhat of a status symbol and a measuring device of how well we’re keeping up with the Joneses. This is another path that leads directly into the “Artificial Wealth Trap.” While I am a strong advocate of taking time to travel and experience other locales, you must keep in mind that vacations are not long term investments. The strategy here is simple: Do not use your credit cards to finance your travles. You may be living it up in the lap of luxury and relaxation while on vacation but ask yourself how relaxed you will feel when the bills come in.
J. J. Childers

The death of some workers in a car accident seems almost like a dramatic liberation; that of some rich vacationers in a plane crash seems more pleasantly humorous; finally, the death of some devotees on a pilgrimage to Lourdes turns out to be tragically comic.
Carl William Brown

Vacations are seen as an antidote to work. They are medicine, a remedy for counteracting the effects of labor… Vacations allow us to be away from the job, to change the patterns of our day, to alter our routine, to reconfigure our actions and habits, to rediscover ourselves.
Al Gini

There are people who, once they have a job, identify with the company, spend themselves, do their utmost, are always available, study, observe, learn, invent new solutions. And there is another category of people who, while respecting the contract, only do the minimum required. They use all their holidays, all their maternity or sick leave, they stop working at the exact moment their working hours end and they don’t dedicate a single thought to it. They don’t get involved, they don’t study, they don’t innovate. Both, legally, do their duty. But, from the point of view of social life, there is an unbridgeable difference between them.
Francesco Alberoni

Opinions and ideas on vacation

In this vacation we should try to exercise only one human discipline: the sublime art of avoidance. Avoid people, avoid… There are only two things we do not avoid doing. Reading. Reading a lot. Which is ultimately the most comfortable way to travel. And then paying attention. To what happens to us and what has happened to us during the year. To understand. “In life it is not the signs that are missing. What is missing is the code.” Pennac says so and I believe it”.
Luciana Litizzetto

Vacations are your best chance in the year to get in some real living, to get out of the job-as-life box, off automatic pilot, and rediscover your passions, enthusiasms, friends, family, and the vitality of partaking in the world outside career brainlock. Social scientists have found that leisure experiences increase positive mood, act as a buffer against life’s setbacks, and open the door to the best times of our lives.
John De Graaf

Going on vacation is also stressful. Do you know the lines we have to stand in at the airport? They never end, you stand there for hours and hours. A gentleman, finally arriving at the counter after a long time, was asked by the girl behind the counter: «So, where are you going to go?». «With difficulty, I’ve finished my vacation…»
Alessandro Siani

I do not really like vacations. I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working. When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin. To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded; I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time.
Robertson Davies

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Top destinations and tours

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The Scottish Highlands

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Dickens literary London

The London Marathon

Christmas Markets in England

Christmas markets in America

Christmas markets in Italy and Germany

Quotes and ideas on vacation

The post Thoughts and reflections on vacation first appeared on The World of English.

Sea quotes and aphorisms

Carl William Brown — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:18:47 +0000

Sea quotes and aphorisms

Sea quotes and aphorisms, ideas, thoughts, short reflections and meditations about the sea, the ocean and the metaphors about the sea, life, travel and troubles.

The ocean moans over dead men’s bones.
Thomas B. Aldrich

A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man, who has no gills.
Ambrose Bierce

Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.
Lord Byron

Sea waves sound reminds me of the beating of my mother’s heart filtered by the amniotic fluid in her placenta. It is an association that, however, cannot calm my anguish for her passing.
Carl William Brown

Praise the sea; on shore remain.
John Florio

He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.
George Herbert

Where there is a sea there are pirates.
Greek Proverb

Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.
Friedrich Nietzsche

If you can’t change the wind, you must adjust your sails.
Sea proverb

The rougher the seas, the smoother we sail. Ahoy!

If the ocean can calm itself, so can you. We are both salt water mixed with air.
Nayyirah Waheed

The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.
Vincent Van Gogh

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves… it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
Adrienne Rich

There is hope from the sea, but none from the grave.
Irish Proverb

Quotes about the sea

Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!
John Keats

In high seas or in low seas, I’m gonna be your friend… I’m gonna be your friend. In high tide or in low tide, I’ll be by your side… I’ll be by your side.
Bob Marley

The ocean makes me feel really small and it makes me put my whole life into perspective.
Beyoncé

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you’ve been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.
Dave Barry

The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.
Vincent van Gogh

The ridiculous modern bourgeoisie is more interested in a seaside vacation, in the garden of their own house, or in the various optional extras to be mounted on their car than in the real fate of humanity.
Carl William Brown

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.
Samuel Johnson

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky; and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
John Masefield

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.
Alexander Smith

The ocean is a mighty harmonist.
William Wordsworth

The only cure for seasickness is to sit on the shady side of a church in the country.
Author Unknown

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.
Hermann Broch

The sea – this truth must be confessed – has no generosity. No display of manly qualities — courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness – has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
Joseph Conrad

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.
Anne Sexton

Sea quotes and aphorisms

Theory is a great net that goes fishing in the sea of experience, what is fished, is fished. Especially today, where the waters are very polluted and fish are scarce.
Carl William Brown

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Joseph Conrad

To me, the sea is like a person – like a child that I’ve known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I’m out there.
Gertrude Ederle

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath…
Herman Melville

I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.
Le Testament d’Orphée

There are veins in the hills where jewels hide And gold lies buried deep; There are harbor-towns where the great ships ride And fame and fortune sleep; But land and sea though we tireless rove And follow each trail to the end Whatever the wealth of our treasure-trove The best we shall find is a friend.
John J. Moment

I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life To the gulls way and the whales way where the winds like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long tricks o
John Masefield

The abode of God too is wherever is earth and sea and air and sky and virtue. Why further do we seek the Gods of heaven? Whatever thou dost behold and whatever thou dost touch that is Jupiter.
Lucan

They went to sea in a sieve they did; In a sieve they went to sea; In spite of all their friends could say.
Edward Lear

In fact the belief in the spherical earth had currency more than a century before Columbus famous voyage. For which cause men may well perceive that the land and the sea are of round shape and form for the portion of the firmament that shows itself in one country does not show itself in another country. And men may well prove by experience and subtle exercise of wit that if a man should find routes by ship that would go to search the world men might go by ship all about the world and around and beneath it….
Sir John Mandeville

Man is so stupid that he despises the companions who sail with him in the stormy sea of troubles of his own existence, while he admires in amazement those who make him sink.
Carl William Brown

Touch the earth love the earth honour the earth her plains her valleys her hills and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.
Henry Beston

Old England is our home and Englishmen are we; Our tongue is known in every clime our flag in every sea.
Mary Howitt

A perfect life is like that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share in its strength and discipline but can also go forth alone in the solitude of the infinite sea. We ought to belong to society to have our place in it and yet be capable of a complete individual existence outside of it.
Philip Gilbert Hamerton

… and so castles made of sand slip into the sea eventually.
Jimi Hendrix

Interest in global circumnavigation is older than Christianity itself. In fact if the following quotation is to be credited some attempts at circumnavigation predated the birth of Christ: As for the rest of the distance around the inhabited earth which has not been visited by us up to the present time (because of the fact that the navigators who sailed in opposite directions never met) it is not of very great extent if we reckon from the parallel distances that have been traversed by us… For those who undertook circumnavigation and turned back without having achieved their purpose say that they were made to turn back not because of any continent that stood in their way and hindered their further advance inasmuch as the sea still continued open as before but because of their destitution and loneliness.
Strabo

We must plant the sea and herd its animals. Using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about farming replacing hunting.
Jacques Yves Cousteau

Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage the very least as feeling her care and the greatest as not exempted from her power.
Richard Hooker

The surging sea of human life forever onward rolls And bears to the eternal shore its daily freight of souls; Tbough bravely sails our bark today pale Death sits at the prow And few shall know we ever lived a hundred years from
Mary A. Ford

The old wooden shed Stranded in a sea of wheat Waiting for harvest.
Daniel Denault

Bernard Loomers father was a sea captain. He was acquainted with his small place in an uncontrollable nature. In a talk in 1974 Loomer described his fathers instructions about the uses of a baseball glove. The father had just overheard his sons sandlot
William Dean

Sea and ocean quotes

Over the glittering rattled ladders of shale the birds cross tangential to the sea at night. Hour upon hour you can sense the undulation of wings. If you lift your cheek quite carefully you can feel the kiss and the wisp of air stirred by the inaudible glide.
Jan Haag

L’éternité. Cest la mer mêlee Au soleil [Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.]
Arthur Rimbaud

The time has come the Walrus said To talk of many things: Of shoesand shipsand sealing-wax Of cabbages and kings And why the sea is boiling hot And whether pigs have wings.
Lewis Carroll

Shermans buzzin along to de sea Like Moses ridin on a bumblebee.
Stephen Vincent Benet

I am once more seated under my own vine and fig tree … and hope to spend the remainder of my days in peaceful retirement making political pursuits yield to the more rational amusement of cultivating the earth.
George Washington

If the sea And the sun Can bleach a bone Til its whiter Than a gull Cleaner than foam Oh how bright My soul Can emerge Purged On the beach Of Christs water And light. And How calm And warm His sand.
Carol Lynn Pearson

Literature feeds on itself, which is why sometimes some writers get indigestion and vomit a sea of nonsense.
Carl William Brown

To the pilot of a deep sea submersible upon finding out what would happen if the craft sprung a leak while submerged. Ill trust you to make sure that doesnt happen.
Dan Rather

How can we fret and stew sub specie aeternitatis – under the calm gaze of ancient Tao? The salt of the sea is in our blood; the calcium of the rocks is in our bones; the genes of ten thousand generations of stalwart progenitors are in our cells. The sun shines and we smile. The winds rage and we bend before them. The blossoms open and we rejoice. Earth is our long home.
Stewart W. Holmes

Power? Its like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it there is nothing there.
Harold Macmillan

O beautiful for spacious skies For amber waves of grain For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!
Katharine Lee Bates

Suddenly from behind the rim of the moon in long slow-motion moments of immense majesty there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel a light delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth … home.
Edgar Mitchell

Esoteric science premises the existence of the Great Unmanifest which may be conceived as a sea of limitless but latent force which underlies all things and whence all things derive their substance and draw their life.
Dion Fortune

Though they go mad they shall be sane Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again Though lovers be lost Love shall not. And Death Shall Have No Dominion.
Dylan Thomas

To cleave that sea [the Aegean] in the gentle autumnal season murmuring the name of each islet is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise.
Nikos Kazantzakis

A gull rides the waves as if Made for the sea A swallow will sail high in the air. Oh let my soul rise let it Soar far and free; Or mount on the high winds of care.
Clara Edmunds-Hemingway

The trumpet! the trumpet! the dead have all heard; Lo the depths of the stone-covered charnels are stirred: From the sea from the land from the south and the north. The vast generations of man are come forth.
Henry H. Milman

Fear not to swear; the winds carry the perjuries of lovers without effect over land and sea thanks to Jupiter. The father of the gods himself has denied effect to what foolish lovers in their eagerness have sworn.
Tibullus

Glory to those who have explored the sea of darkness and what there was to explore. Their folly represents the highest degree of intellect.
Carl William Brown

We watch the liner in the distance glide Out from the sheltered waters of the bay Into the arms of ocean’s vastness won. Enfolded in infinity of tide We lose it and the last faint smoke line gray Merges into the sunset and is gone. Vanished from sight and lost art thou at sea Swallowed in oceans blue immensity? Ah no. Though trackless be the deep and wide Thy pilot shall bring thee triumphantly Into the harbor on the other side.
Edith E. McGee

Sea life quotes and aphorisms

The sea is God’s thoughts spread out.
Charles Morgan

The Three Ships As I went up the mountain-side The sea below me glitterd wide And Eastward far away I spied On Christmas Day on Christmas Day The three great ships that take the tide On Christmas Day in the morning. Ye have heard the song how thes
Alfred Noyes

Twisting inland the sea fog takes awhile in the apple trees.
Michael McClintock

The use of the sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession thereof.
Queen Elizabeth I

Cease rude Boreas blustering railer! List ye landsmen all to me; Messmates hear a brother sailor Sing the dangers of the sea.
George A. Stevens

The hills have been high for man’s mounting The woods have been dense for his axe The stars have been thick for his counting The sands have been wide for his tracks. The sea has been deep for his diving The poles have been broad for his sway But bravely he’s proved in his striving That Where there’s a will there’s a way.
Eliza Cook

A wet sheet and a flowing sea A wind that follows fast And fills the white and rustling sail And bends the gallant mast. And bends the gallant mast my boys While like the eagle free Away the good ship flies and leaves Old England on the lee.
Allan Cunningham

The sea! the sea! the open sea! The blue the fresh the ever free!
Bryan W. Procter

The sea of mass media stupidity with socials has become an ocean of imbecility.
Carl William Brown

What fairy-like music steals over the sea Entrancing our senses with charmed melody?
Mrs. C. B. Wilson

I am obsessed with the edges of things like stone at the edge of the sea when foam breaks into sky or your hand dissolves into my.
Stanley Cooperman

We are as near to heaven by sea as by land!
Humphrey Gilbert

Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog so the captain re
Frank Koch

No life can be barren which hears the whisper of the wind in the branches or the voice of the sea as it breaks upon the shore; and no soul can lack happiness looking up to the midnight stars.
William Winter

Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing Onward the sailors cry: Carry the lad thats born to be king Over the sea to Skye.
Harold Edwin Boulton

The sea – this truth must be confessed – has no generosity. No display of manly qualities – courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness – has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
Joseph Conrad

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it… “Beware of me,” it says, “but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate to be near the sea and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
William Hazlitt

The sea is a desert of waves, A wilderness of water.
Langston Hughes

Sea aphorisms and quotes

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected on the deep.
William James

Ocean separates lands, not souls.
Munia Khan

I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.
Charlotte Eriksson

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100 gorgeous quotes and aphorisms

Carl William Brown — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:13:40 +0000

100 gorgeous quotes and aphorisms

100 gorgeous quotes and aphorisms by great and famous authors and writers edited for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger. (Find out more about him on Amazon).

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

Tutte le religioni. Tutto questo canto. Un solo canto. La pace sia con voi.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Go easy on yourself, for the outcome of all affairs is determined by God’s decree.
Osho

The act of disobedience, as an act of freedom, is the beginning of reason.
Erich Fromm

Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.
Michel de Montaigne

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect … Your have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

Bravery does not mean being fearless. It means to be full of fear but still not being dominated by it.
Osho

The ancestors. The dead. It is not a mere metaphor, an encrypted message to indicate the unconscious or something like that. When he speaks of the dead, Jung means the dead. And they are present in the images, they continue to live.
Sonu Shamdasani

Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

There is the music of Heaven in all things.
Hildegard von Bingen

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

An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan.
Warren Buffett

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
Oscar Wilde

The utter stupidity of humanity and its leaders is also demonstrated by the fact that thousands of atomic bombs have been built without intending to use them; perhaps they are considered a long-term investment.
Carl William Brown

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

Frankly, if a fateful and providential disaster were to wipe out two-thirds of the world’s population, I couldn’t help but be happy. I suffer more when I see a leaf fall from a tree.
Carl William Brown

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

The development and growth of tools connected to or managed by artificial intelligence proceeds proportionally with the general imbecility of the world population.
Carl William Brown

I have always been of the opinion that unpopularity earned by doing what is right is not unpopularity at all, but glory.
Cicero

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

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

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

Top 100 great universal quotes

As artificial intelligence develops, natural stupidity also increases indiscriminately.
Carl William Brown

All your knowledge is dust. Knowing is your purity, knowledge is dust.
Osho

The cyclical and repetitive essence of matter, while astonishing on the one hand, is also monotonous and boring, comical and pathetic on the other.
Carl William Brown

Hildegard, the human soul is ‘symphonic’; music is part of the profound nature.
Hildegard von Bingen

Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed, and in the process, a huge pain in the ass is created.
Carl William Brown

Socialism may begin with the best of intentions, but it always ends with the Gestapo.
Winston Churchill

Anger transformed becomes compassion. Sex transformed becomes prayer. Greed transformed becomes sharing.
Osho

Ai bambini bisogna insegnare a pensare, non cosa pensare.
Margaret Mead

I dropped out of school at age 15 with virtually no money and no education. If I could make big money in the stock market, think about how well you can do. There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to achieve far more than I have.
Mark Minervini

Where the environment is stupid, or prejudiced, or cruel, it is a mark of merit to oppose it.
Bertrand Russell

A man is born to work, to suffer and to fight; he who doesn’t, must perish.
Nikola Tesla

We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
David Clark

Individual imbecility, integrating and adapting to universal stupidity, can generate a certain unconscious and fleeting satisfaction.
Carl William Brown

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
Denis Diderot

Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.
Anne Frank

The historian, the futurist, the surrealist, and the nihilist move in environments that do not exist, following the trail of death and stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Mathematics is just a language, and as such, it’s conventional, arbitrary, and capable of expressing a lot of bullshit.
Carl William Brown

But the devil was so tired that he left everything to men, who knew how to do things better than he did.
Leonardo Sciascia

Social life is a distraction, real intelligence thrives in isolation.
Nikola Tesla

War in Iran, China offers the Islamic regime the following sacred texts: The Art of War (Sun Tzu), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), The Analects (Confucius), the Bible (Various Authors), all accompanied by a huge load of pork.
Carl William Brown

C’è la musica del Cielo in tutte le cose.
Ildegarda di Bingen

Why look for conspiracy when stupidity explains so much.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.
Albert Einstein

I have great faith in fools, – self-confidence my friends will call it.
Edgar Allan Poe

Wealth and poverty do not lie in a person’s estate, but in their souls.
Antisthenes

If you want to avoid seeing an idiot, break the mirror.
Francois Rabelais

Rumi aphorisms and quotes

Civilized man has traded a portion of his chance for happiness for a measure of security.
Sigmund Freud

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake

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

The father of modern stress research, Hans Seyle, claims that stress doesn’t depend so much on what happens, but on how we interpret it. That may be true, but I wish him every possible misfortune, and then we’ll see.
Carl William Brown

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

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf

You must also give mental and physical fitness priority.
Jim Otto

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Exercise should be regarded as tribute to the heart.
Gene Tunney

In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.
Henri Frederic Amiel

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt

I am not a glutton – I am an explorer of food.
Erma Bombeck

Reason is the root, through which the resonant word flourishes.
Hildegard von Bingen

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

Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech.
Hildegard von Bingen

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

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

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Those who lack a certain amount of free time are cut off from many of the best things.
Bertrand Russell

Wise men argue cases, fools decide them.
Anacharsis

If you don’t become aware of the three idiots within you, you will never become a sage. It is by overcoming the three idiots that one truly becomes wise.
Osho

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

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
Marcus Aurelius

Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Marquis De Sade

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

Osho quotes and aphorisms

The common man with extraordinary power represents the greatest danger to humanity, not the demon or the sadist.
Erich Fromm

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

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

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended.
Morgan Freeman

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
Aldous Huxley

Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx

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

A mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table.
Aristotle

A person who lives in a sort of sleep can never be intelligent – and awareness is the purest flame of intelligence.
Osho

El Estado es una banda de ladrones, compuesta por los individuos más inmorales, codiciosos y sin escrúpulos de cada sociedad.
Murray Rothbard

The beautiful is nothing but the terrible at its beginning (Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
Thomas Eliot

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue.
Aristophanes

A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.
Seneca

I have found God, but he is insufficient.
Henry Miller

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.
Mark Twain

El Estado es peor que una mafia. Es más grande, más criminal y además tiene escuelas. Una mafia normal te roba y te deja en paz.
Miguel Anxo Bastos

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

Unless a person is stupid he cannot be a politician. It is not that the politicians are stupid – in fact, only stupid people are attracted towards politics.
Osho

Human biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
Erich Fromm

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

Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very fast.
Thomas Jefferson

To keep the body in good health is a duty… otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.
Buddha

Much learning does not teach understanding.
Heraclitus

God cannot be an object. It is deepest depth of your own being. How can you see it.
Osho

Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.
Marcus T. Cicero

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
Aesop

The first wealth is health.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.
Marcus Aurelius

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

The world is full of tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or surprising things, and those who fail to engage with the spectacle it offers miss one of life’s privileges.
Bertrand Russell

The only truly rich are those who desire no more than they already possess.
Erich Fromm

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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

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