Rumi Coleman Barks Quotes

#1. I did everything. I ran my life exactly as I wanted to, all the time. I never listened to anybody. I'm pig-headed.

Michael Caine

#2. Jerk equals narcissist.Narcissists tend to be risk takers. Risk takers happen to do better in general in businesses. So jerk equals narcissist, equals risk taker.

Eric Bolling

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I don't really have a problem with the pain of life. Perhaps that is because I am a martial artist and I am used to dealing with pain. Or perhaps I adjusted to pain because there has been a great deal of it in my life.

Frederick Lenz

#6. All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire.

Rumi

#7. Man cannot be homophobic without having concerned himself with another's sex life.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#8. Actors want to act; actors want to emote. It's like the emotional equivalent of tearing your shirt off and screaming to the heavens: you want to express, and you want to be seen to be expressing.

Joel Edgerton

#9. If you're going to have centralization, why not have it!

Frank Lloyd Wright

#10. An unSpiritual person is: A Human Current of Energy in an Ocean of Air

Christopher Zzenn Loren

#11. It needs brains to be a real fool.

George MacDonald

#12. 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

#13. If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.

Mae West

#14. All of my films I've made have had an element of physicality and action but I really enjoy the drama of it because it's where I feel I'm really doing something.

Channing Tatum

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. ... 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

#18. The 'flesh' is too bad to be cleansed; it must be crucified.

Watchman Nee

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. I close my eyes and think of the photograph Culler showed me. I see it in my head perfectly. He'll be there, at that school. Another piece of my father. And then another. Six pieces. I will find them all, put them together. I'll find him.
And then I'll let him go.

Courtney Summers

#23. When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times.

Mark Twain

#24. 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

#25. We all make assumptions about the world - based on individual experience and cultural background - that affect our judgment of how that balance should look

Sheena Iyengar

#26. [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