Top 35 Coleman Barks Quotes
#1. If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi's poetry is really remarkable.
Huston Smith
#3. A man once asked Rumi, "Why is it you talk so much about silence?" His answer: "The radiant one inside me has never said a word.
Coleman Barks
#4. Anything you grab hold of on the bank breaks with the river's pressure. When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current.
Coleman Barks
#5. We were all born by accident but this wandering caravan
will make camp in perfection
Forget the nonsense categories of there and here, race, nation, religion, starting point and destination
You are soul, and you are love, ...
No more questions now as to what it is we're doing here
Coleman Barks
#6. It's a beautiful lucid dream that has language that I can fiddle with.
Coleman Barks
#7. I think we all have a core that's ecstatic, that knows and that looks up in wonder. We all know that there are marvelous moments of eternity that just happen. We know them.
Coleman Barks
#9. Just being sentient and in a body with the sun coming up is a state of rapture.
Coleman Barks
#10. Water the fruit trees, and don't water the thorns. Be generous to what nurtures the spirit and God's luminous reason-light. Don't honor what causes dysentry and knotted up tumors.
Coleman Barks
#11. The religions of the world are luminous in their individuality, and they have valuable social and soulmaking functions. Surely someday we will quit killing each other over their different strategies.
Coleman Barks
#12. All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire.
Rumi
#13. If you think there's an important difference between being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist, then you're making a division between your heart, what you love with, and the way you act in the world.
Coleman Barks
#14. If you teach three university courses a day, you need something to turn your mind off.
Coleman Barks
#15. Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'
doesn't make sense any more.
Coleman Barks
#16. I had been a kind of natural mystic my whole life, growing up there in Tennessee next to the river. Somehow, that was important for my consciousness. I still don't study [mysticism]. I just wait for experiences.
Coleman Barks
#17. In the front yard lives the oldest thing around, a white oak
That I used to say is my love for the world,
That I now would just call love as it is.
Belonging to nobody, no metaphor, the very.
Coleman Barks
#18. Little by little a person reaches forty and fifty and sixty, and feels more complete. God could've thrown full blown prophets flying through the cosmos in an instant.
Coleman Barks
#19. I like to walk around my neighborhood, late in the afternoon. I sometimes wind up at the wonderful, old Shell station that's been changed into a coffee shop. Right where Johnny used to change my oil, I have a latte and take out my little book bag. It doesn't sound very austere.
Coleman Barks
#20. I think my life is tremendously interesting, and surely, other people do too.
Coleman Barks
#21. [Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity ... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral ...
Coleman Barks
#22. Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.
Coleman Barks
#23. When you meet a new friend, the world has more light in it, doesn't it? Things become more spontaneous, and more full of laughing and freedom and novelty.
Coleman Barks
#24. These poems need to be released from their cages,
Coleman Barks
#25. We sometimes make spiderwebs of smoke and saliva, fragile though-packets
Leave thinking to the one who gave intelligence
Stop weaving and watch how the pattern improve
Coleman Barks
#26. Solitude is a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.
Coleman Barks
#27. Ramana Maharshi and Rumi would agree: the joy of being human is in uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin.
Coleman Barks
#28. It's such a foolish thing to argue about names, when what we're doing is all one thing.
Coleman Barks
#29. From 'A Bowl Fallen From the Roof'
Be quiet now and wait.
It may be that the ocean one,
the one we desire so to move into and become,
desires us out here on land a little longer,
going our sundry ways to the shore.
-Rumi
Coleman Barks
#30. What I deeply want ... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self.
Coleman Barks
#33. There's some sort of exchange that goes on between human beings that is one of the highest things we do.
Coleman Barks
#34. Fold within fold, the beloved
drowns in its own being. This world
is drenched with that drowning.
Coleman Barks
#35. ... the work of the (Muslim Sufi) dervish community
was to open the heart,
explore the mystery of union,
to fiercely search for and try to say the truth,
and to celebrate the glory and difficulty
in being in human incarnation.
Coleman Barks
