Arts & Crafts | The World of English

Osho quotes and aphorisms

The post 100 gorgeous quotes and aphorisms first appeared on The World of English.

Jalal al-Din Rumi quotes and aphorisms

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

Rumi quotes and aphorisms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dance until you shatter yourself.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jalal al-Din Rumi quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

Joy lives concealed in grief.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let yourself become living poetry.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence gives answers.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sorrow… It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

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

Rumi aphorisms and quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor… Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can also read:

Jiddu Krishnamurti best quotes

Jiddu Krishnamurti reflections

Jiddu Krishnamurti best quotes

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

Osho quotes and aphorisms

Carl William Brown — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:29:06 +0000

Osho quotes and aphorisms

Osho quotes and aphorisms, famous phrases and great words of wisdom from the great Indian nonconformist thinker, philosopher, mystic and spiritual master.

OSHO – never born, never died. He only visited this planet Earth between December 11, 1931, and January 19, 1990.
Osho Epitaph

Never speak of me in the past tense”. My presence here will be many times greater without the burden of my tortured body.
Osho

A borrowed truth is the greatest lie in the world. Truth can only be true when it is based on your own experience, utterly your own experience.
Osho

A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.
Osho

A child needs immense privacy, as much as possible, a maximum of privacy, so that he can develop his individuality. (Here are a few more good parenting tips)
Osho

A comfortable, convenient life is not a real life – the more comfortable, the less alive. The most comfortable life is in the grave.
Osho

A serious person can never be innocent, and one who is innocent can never be serious.
Osho

A woman is one of the most beautiful phenomena in the world; not to be compared with anything else. The woman is the masterpiece of god.
Osho

Accept the fact that we are strangers; that we don´t know who you are, that you don´t know who I am. I myself don´t know who I am, so how can you know?
Osho

Accept yourself as you are. And that is the most difficult thing in the world, because it goes against your training, education, your culture.
Osho

All beliefs suffocate and all beliefs help you not to be really alive. They deaden your being.
Osho

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

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

Anywhere everywhere! Anything anyhow! just dance!
Osho

Be a drunkard, drunk with life, with the wine of existence. Don’t remain sober. The sober person remains dead.
Osho

Be aware – deep down you are really attached to your negative emotions. They are your ego.
Osho

Be like an alone peak high in the sky. Why should you hanker to belong? You are not a thing! Things belong!
Osho

Be the person you are. Never try to be another, and you will become mature. Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost.
Osho

Be. Don’t try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming, your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.
Osho

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

By ‘Love’ people mean a certain kind of monopoly understanding a simple fact: that the moment you possess a living being you have killed him.
Osho

Celebration is my attitude, unconditional to what life brings.
Osho

Desire disappears as you become more and more aware. When awareness is one hundred percent, there is no desire at all.
Osho

Die each moment so that you are renewed each moment.
Osho

Discover yourself, otherwise you have to depend on other people’s opinions who don’t know themselves.
Osho

Doing brings ego. Ego is the shadow of action. And there is only one thing that is not-doing, and that is awareness, watchfulness.
Osho

Don´t be unnecessarily burdened by the past. Go on closing the chapters that you have read; there is no need to go back again and again.
Osho

Don’t analyze, celebrate it.
Osho

Don’t be angry at life. It is not life that is frustrating you, it is you who are not listening to life.
Osho

Don’t be bothered by perfection. Replace the word ‘Perfection’ by ‘Totality. Totality will give you a different dimension.
Osho

Don’t be serious about seriousness. Laugh about it, be a little foolish. Don’t condemn foolishness; it has its own beauties.
Osho

Don’t expect, and there will be no frustration. Frustration is just a shadow which follows expectation.
Osho

Don’t go on with borrowed knowledge. Otherwise you will forget that you are ignorant, and you will remain ignorant.
Osho

Don’t pay much attention to fear, because that is dangerous. If you pay much attention to fear you are feeding it, and it will grow.
Osho

Don’t postpone anything beautiful for tomorrow. Live intensely, live totally, here and now.
Osho

Drop comparing and life is really beautiful. Drop comparing and you can enjoy life to the full.
Osho

Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it.
Osho

Drop the idea that attachment and love are one thing. They are enemies. It is attachment that destroys all love.
Osho

Dropping the mask and bringing out your original face is the whole alchemy of meditation.
Osho

Easy is right. Begin right and you are easy. . . . Easy is right means natural is right, effortlessness is right, egolessness is right.
Osho

Eyes which have lost their tears have lost their most beautiful, their most glorious treasure.
Osho

Fools are more healthy then the so-called wise. Thy live in the moment and they know that they are fools, so they are not worried about what others think about them.
Osho

Forget about getting, simply give; and I guarantee you, you will get much.
Osho

Freedom is a ladder: one side of the ladder reaches hell, the other side touches heaven. It is the same ladder; the choice is yours.
Osho

Freedom is our most precious treasure. Don’t lose it for anything.
Osho

Friendship is a relationship, friendliness is a state of your being. You are simply friendly; to whom, that is not the point.
Osho

Friendship is the purest love. It is the highest form of love where nothing is asked for, no condition, where one simply enjoys giving.
Osho

Get out of your head and get into your heart. Think less, feel more.
Osho

Giving love is the real beautiful experience, because then you are an emperor. Getting love is a very small experience. It is the experience of beggar.
Osho

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

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

God is a person; godliness is a quality. You cannot become God, but you can be godly.
Osho

Happiness is an art that one has to learn. It has nothing to do with your doing or not doing.
Osho

Happiness is not conditional; nothing is needed to be happy. Only to be alive is needed – and that you are, you already are.
Osho

Hell is our creation, and we create hell by trying to do the impossible. Heaven is our nature, it is our spontaneity. It is where we always are.
Osho

Humanity will never be religious unless all organized religions disappear and religion becomes an individual commitment towards existence.
Osho

I am not anti-life as other religions are. I am absolutely for life, and life in its essence means love.
Osho

I don’t want followers, obedient people. I want intelligent friends, fellow travelers.
Osho

I love this world because it is imperfect. It is imperfect, and that’s why it is growing; if it was perfect it would have been dead.
Osho

I resolve never to make any resolutions because all resolutions are restrictions for the future. All resolutions are imprisonments.
Osho

I would like marriage to disappear completely from the world, and with marriage, divorce will disappear.
Osho

I’ll never make any resolutions. Drop all resolutions! Let life be a natural spontaneity. The only golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
Osho

If jealousy disappears and love still remains, then you have something solid in your life which is worth having.
Osho

If love can not keep you together, nothing else can keep you together. And if love cannot keep you together, than anything that can keep you together is dangerous.
Osho

If something is meant to go elsewhere, it will never come your way, but if it is yours by destiny, from you it cannot flee.
Osho

If whatsoever you have been living can be conveyed by words, that means you have not lived at all.
Osho

If you are sad you are wrong; if you are joyful you are right.
Osho

If you cannot enjoy your own company, who else is going to enjoy it?
Osho

If you cannot love yourself, you don’t know even the taste of love or what love means.
Osho

Osho aphorisms and quotes

If you clean the floor with love, you have done an invisible painting. Live each moment in such delight that it gives you something inner.
Osho

If you have no conditions you can enjoy life infinitely. If you have conditions, because of them you become incapable.
Osho

If you live with love, through love, you will live a great life, because love makes everything great.
Osho

If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.
Osho

If you love yourself, you love others. If you hate yourself, you hate others. In relationship with others, it is only you mirrored.
Osho

If you love yourself, you will be surprised: others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself.
Osho

If you remain always far, love will die. If you remain always near, love will die. Love can survive only in a continuous flowing relationship.
Osho

If you work without love, you are working like a slave. When you work with love, you work like an emperor. Your work is your joy, your work is your dance.
Osho

In relationship, be blissful, in aloneness be aware and they will help each other, like two wings of a bird.
Osho

Instead of pleasing, learn the art of happiness.
Osho

Intelligence never grows by imitation: Intelligence grows by experimentation. Intelligence grows by taking challenges.
Osho

It cannot be called freedom, a freedom which can choose only the right and not the wrong; then that is not freedom.
Osho

It does not matter if you are a rose or a lotus or a marigold. What matters is that you are flowering.
Osho

It is a strange experience, that those who have left me have always left places for a better quality of people. I have never been a loser.
Osho

It is always death that comes before your desires are fulfilled. Even if you live for a thousand years your desires are not going to be fulfilled.
Osho

It is because nobody has been teaching you about hate; hence, hate has remained pure, unadulterated. When a man hatesyou, you can trust that he hates you.
Osho

It is better to be ignorant; at least the ignorance is yours. It is authentic, it is real, sincere and honest!
Osho

It is imperfect, and that’s why it is growing; if it was perfect it would have been dead. Growth is possible only if there is imperfection.
Osho

It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love, or how you love, it matters only that you love.
Osho

It’s not a question of learning much. On the contrary. It’s a question of unlearning much.
Osho

Just get out of your own way.
Osho

Just see how much respect God has paid to you. You are a masterpiece – unrepeatable, incomparable, utterly unique.
Osho

Knowledge is borrowed; knowing is yours, your own. It is authentic knowledge is information, knowing is transformation.
Osho

Life begins where fear ends.
Osho

Life exists without rules; games cannot exist without rules. Only false religion has rules, because false religion is a game.
Osho

Life has no meaning. Rejoice! It has no meaning. Dance, sing, enjoy! It has no meaning. You need not be serious. It is a cosmic joke.
Osho

Life in itself is so beautiful that to ask the question of the meaning of life is simply nonsense.
Osho

Life is a mirror, it reflects your face. Be friendly, and all of life will reflect friendliness.
Osho

Life is a mystery, and there is nothing to explain everything is just open, it is in front of you. Encounter it! Meet it! Be courageous!
Osho

Life is a purposeless play, a play of infinite forces-beautiful if you don’t have an achiever’s mind, ugly if you have ambition to become something.
Osho

Life is absolutely balanced between the positive and the negative. Now it is your choice which side you want to be – in heaven or in hell.
Osho

Life is not a tension anywhere except in the minds of humanity.
Osho

Life is not given to you to murder, to destroy. Life has been given to you to create, and to rejoice, and to celebrate.
Osho

Life is not logic, life is not philosophy. Life is a dance, a song, a celebration! It is more like love and less like logic.
Osho

Love brings freedom. Loyalty brings slavery.
Osho

Love cannot be taught, it can only be caught.
Osho

Love in itself, or just having a relationship with someone, is not going to give you happiness, unless you bring happiness with you.
Osho

Love is a bird and it loves to be free. It needs the whole sky to grow.
Osho

Love is a wine; you have to taste it, you have to drink it, you have to become drunk with it, only then do you know what it is.
Osho

Love is authentic only when it gives freedom. Love is true only when it respects the other person’s individuality, his privacy.
Osho

Love is happy when it is able to give something. The ego is happy when it is able to take something.
Osho

Love is just like a breeze: it comes, but you should not close your doors to keep the breeze inside.
Osho

Love is not manageable, it is simply something that happens, and the moment you try to manage, everything misfires.
Osho

Love is the ultimate, the end. You love for love’s own sake. It is not a means to anything else, it is its own end.
Osho

Love is true only when it does not interfere in the privacy of the other person. It respects his individuality, his privacy.
Osho

Love is true only when it is spontaneous, unplanned, unpracticed, uncultivated, un-thought.
Osho

Love is ultimate, the highest health, because love makes one whole. When you love a master by and by you completely forgot about love.
Osho

Love knows how to forgive. Love cannot hurt and cannot be violent.
Osho

Love lives in waiting – dies in meeting, becomes ordinary.
Osho

Love means the art of being with others. Meditation means the art of being with yourself. Both are two aspects of the same coin.
Osho

Love needs two things: it has to be rooted in freedom and it has to know the art of trust.
Osho

Love never dies through separation, never. If it dies at all, it dies through too much togetherness; never by separation.
Osho

Lovers are mirrors to each other. Love makes you aware of your original face.
Osho

Lovers have known sometimes what saints have not known.
Osho

Man is always exploited through fear.
Osho

Man is born only as a potential. He can become a thorn for himself and for others, he can also become a flower for himself and for others.
Osho

Mind is the illusion that which is not but appears, and appears so much that you think that you are the mind.
Osho

Misery comes the moment you become clinging, attached. The moment you put conditions on life.
Osho

My enlightenment has freed me from everything, including enlightenment.
Osho

Never ask, “Who is my real friend?” Ask, “Am I a real friend to somebody?” That is the right question. Always be concerned with yourself.
Osho

Never be ashamed of your tears. Be proud that you are still natural. Be proud that you can express the inexpressible through your tears.
Osho

Never obey anyone’s command unless it is coming from within you also.
Osho

Never sacrifice your life for anything! Sacrifice everything for life! Life is the ultimate goal.
Osho

Never try to change a person you love, because the very effort to change says that you love half, and the other half of the person is not accepted.
Osho

No, I don’t want to give my people sticks. I want to give them eyes.
Osho

Nobody else can destroy you except you; nobody else can save you except you. You are the Judas and you are the Jesus.
Osho

Nobody has the power to take two steps together; you can take only one step at a time.
Osho

Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and nobody can make you happy.
Osho

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.
Osho

Once I was on a journey and someone asked me which word in a man’s vocabulary was the most valuable. My reply was, Love.
Osho

Once you have tasted the juice of the present, you don’t care about dangers. Once you are in tune with life then nothing matter. Life all there is.
Osho

Once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created.
Osho

One day you will disappear on a funeral pyre – just into nothingness, as smoke. Don’t get attached to anything.
Osho

One who thinks in terms of superiority will always remain inferior because these are two aspects of the same coin.
Osho

Only idiots are not controversial.
Osho

Only people suffering from inferiority complex want to impress others. A really superior person never compares himself with anybody else.
Osho

Only silence communicates the truth as it is.
Osho

Paradise is within you, in your state of no-mind. And hell is also within you, in your very mind.
Osho

People are not things, you cannot have ownership.
Osho

People love freedom – but nobody wants responsibility. And they come together, they are inseparable.
Osho

People say love is blind because they do not know what love is. I say unto you, only love has eyes; other than love, everything is blind.
Osho

Perfect people don’t exist. And perfect people, if they existed, would be very boring. It is imperfection that keeps life interesting.
Osho

Possessiveness destroys love. And they should not be possessed, because that again destroys your love.
Osho

Real love is not an escape from loneliness, real love is an overflowing aloneness. One is so happy in being alone that one would like to share.
Osho

Real love makes you more of an individual. It does not efface your individuality, it gives you individuality. Real love is very respectful.
Osho

Relationship is the need of those who cannot be alone. Two alone persons relate, communicate, commune, and yet they remain alone.
Osho

Remember it is not only you who are seeking truth – truth is also seeking you.
Osho

Resolution is struggle. Resolution is ego. Resolution is saying, “I cannot live spontaneously.
Osho

Respect your life. Out of that respect you will start respecting life in others.
Osho

Respect your uniqueness, and drop comparison. Relax into your being.
Osho

Sadness comes, joy comes, and everything passes by. What remains always is the witness. The witness is beyond all polarities.
Osho

Sharing is the most precious religious experience. Sharing is good.
Osho

Suicide leads nowhere, it simply enters your consciousness into another womb of a lower kind, because you could not manage to live on a higher level.
Osho

Take it easy, and remember “Easy is Right.”
Osho

Take life easily, lovingly, playfully, non-seriously. Seriousness is a disease, the greatest disease of the soul and playfulness the greatest health.
Osho

That which makes you miserable is the only sin. That which takes you away from yourself is the only thing to be avoided.
Osho

That’s why children look so beautiful because they are yet full of hope, full of dreams, and they have not yet known frustration.
Osho

The ego is an island in the ocean of Hell. You want to get rid of the Hell but you don’t want to get rid of that island. Then there is trouble.
Osho

The existence loves you, otherwise you would not be here. Relax into your being, you are cherished by the whole.
Osho

The greatest freedom is to be free of one’s own mind.
Osho

The knowledgeable person lives with a question mark ‘?’ and the man of awe and wonder lives with an exclamation mark.
Osho

Osho quotes, aphorisms and ideas

The less the head, the more the wound will heal. No head there is no wound. Live a headless life. Move as a total being, and accept things.
Osho

The Mind: a beautiful servant, a dangerous master.
Osho

The only authentic responsibility is towards your own potential. Values have not to be imposed on you. They should grow with your awareness, in you.
Osho

The only thing that matters in life is your own opinion about yourself, nobody can destroy your dignity then, because it is not dependent on anybody’s opinion.
Osho

The only thing that matters in life, is your own opinion about yourself.
Osho

The people who ask what is the meaning of life are the people who have missed life, who are alive because they are still breathing; otherwise they are dead.
Osho

The person who can be happy alone is really an individual. If your happiness depends on the others. You are slave. You are yet not free. You are in bondage.
Osho

The person who enjoys his life has no desire to possess, because he knows the real things of life which are worth enjoying cannot be purchased.
Osho

The person who trusts can relax into existence. The person who cannot trust remains tense, remains anxious, afraid.
Osho

The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.
Osho

The society is ill;individuals are victims. Society needs therapy;individuals simply need love. The society is the patient and needs hospitalization.
Osho

The ultimate state of love is freedom, absolute freedom, and any relationship that destroys freedom is not worthwhile.
Osho

The word devil is very beautiful, if you read it backwards it becomes lived. That which is lived becomes divine and that which is not lived becomes the devil.
Osho

There has never been a person like you before, there is nobody else like you right now in the whole world, and there will never be anybody like you.
Osho

These are the only two real emotions and love. If you don’t love, you will be in fear. If you are in fear, you cannot love. If you love, fear is impossible.
Osho

This very moment you can drop all problems because they are your creation.
Osho

This world is just a game. Winners lose and losers win the game is still the same. This life is just a play. Those who say dont know and those who know dont say.
Osho

To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.
Osho

To choose is to choose a prison; to choose is to choose a bondage. To choose is wrong, to be choiceless is to be right.
Osho

To create guilt, all that you need is a very simple thing: start calling mistakes, errors sins. They are simply mistakes, human.
Osho

To love means to drop the ego, to drop yourself. Love means not to BE.
Osho

To possess anything is to be possessed by it. The more you possess, the more slavery you create around yourself.
Osho

Tomorrow-drop that word from your vocabulary! Tomorrow does not exist, it cannot exist: it is not in the nature of things. Only this day exists.
Osho

Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.
Osho

U bring a beautiful prince;in the morning he becomes a frog! Every prince turns into a frog in the end. And then you are puzzled: What went wrong.
Osho

Unless you love yourself, you can’t love anybody. Be selfish.
Osho

Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind.
Osho

We have to change this world by celebrating, by dancing, by singing, by music, by meditation, by love, not by struggle.
Osho

We remain unnecessarily worried. All worries are futile because that which is going to happen is going to happen.
Osho

Whatever you are doing, don’t let past move your mind;don’t let future disturb you. Because the past is no more, and the future is not yet.
Osho

Whatsoever you hide goes on growing, and whatsoever you expose, if it is wrong it disappears, evaporates in the sun, and if it is right it is nourished.
Osho

Whatsoever you possess will not give you contentment. The mind, the ego, will always feel unfulfilled.
Osho

When I say that you are Gods and Goddesses I mean that your possibility is infinite, your potentiality is infinite.
Osho

When it comes to deciding between your love and your truth, truth has to be the decisive factor.
Osho

When you are different the whole world is different. It is not a question of creating a different world. It is only a ques of creating a different you.
Osho

When you really laugh for those few moments you are in a deep meditative state. Thinking stops. It is impossible to laugh and think together.
Osho

When your ego is no more, only then will you know who you are.
Osho

Whenever you plan for love, whenever deliberateness enters into it it becomes phony and false.
Osho

Wherever you are afraid, try to explore, and you will find death hiding somewhere behind. All fear is of death. Death is the only fear source.
Osho

Whoever may have died right now, each death is your death, because each death is a reminder that you are not going to be here forever.
Osho

You are a great problem-creator. Just understand this and suddenly problems disappear.
Osho

You are creating your own hell.
Osho

You can become happy just by deciding to be happy.
Osho

You can go on changing the outer for lives and you will never be satisfied. Unless the inner changes, the outer can never be perfect.
Osho

You cannot think about love. Either you can love, or you cannot, but you cannot think about it.
Osho

You don’t have any problems. Only this much has to be understood. This very moment you can drop all problems because they are your creations.
Osho

You have to drop all your defenses, only then is intimacy possible. We are all hiding a thousand and one things, not only from others but from ourselves.
Osho

You just listen to your own heart – that is your only teacher. In the real journey of life, your own intuition is your only teacher.
Osho

You will come closer and closer to perfection, but you will never be perfect. Perfection is not the way of existence. Growth is the way.
Osho

Your heaven and your happiness is always somewhere else; it is never where you are. Real happiness is always HERE, it is always NOW.
Osho

Your honesty, Your love, Your compassion should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures.
Osho

Your marriage is a subtle politics of domination. Your fatherhood, motherhood, is a subtle politics.
Osho

Your politicians, priests, parents, they all are guilt-creators, because that is the only way that you can be controlled and manipulated.
Osho

Your real being only flowers with unconditional love. Ambition is against love. Anything that is against love is against you and your real life.
Osho

You can also read:

Jiddu Krishnamurti reflections

Jalal al-Din Rumi quotes and aphorisms

Quotes and aphorisms on religion

The post Osho quotes and aphorisms first appeared on The World of English.

Thoughts and reflections on religion

Carl William Brown — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:28:47 +0000

Thoughts and reflections on religion

Thoughts and reflections on religion. Ideas, quotes, and critiques from various authors on various aspects of the religious phenomenon and its impact on society.

The ancient religions, with their sublime and ridiculous, good-natured and cruel symbols, did not fall from the sky, but were born in this human soul, the same soul that still lives within us today. All those things, their primordial forms, live within us and can at any moment assail us with destructive force, that is, in the form of mass suggestion, against which the individual is defenseless.
Carl Gustav Jung

Even if only half-believed, the religious promise serves many as a soothing remedy for the anticipated pain of our moral perdition. Given the numbing benefit it provides, believers ignore its improbability and negotiate their daily conduct as best they can with the prohibitions and rules promulgated by priests, proclaimed administrators of the theological remedy.
Fernando Savater

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

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

A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; – nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
Albert Einstein

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.
Ludwig Feuerbach

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

Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
Sigmund Freud

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

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Aldous Huxley

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

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

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

There are no people in the world I like better than priests; they receive their monthly check from the curia, receive money for every funeral, wedding, or baptism, accept offerings for every special Mass, and just to make ends meet, they receive alms and donations during various liturgies. They then don’t let various donations and gifts slip by, and they pursue every possible and hypothetical inheritance with fervent Christian zeal. Finally, they don’t mind raising funds with envelopes, bulletins, and various celebrations for the ordinary and extraordinary maintenance of their houses of worship and their parishes. Now, it would be enough to allow them to marry, and far from the defection of vocations, they should instead hold public competitions.
Carl William Brown

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

As each Sister is to become a Co-Worker of Christ in the slums, each ought to understand what God and the Missionaries of Charity expect from her. Let Christ radiate and live his life in her and through her in the slums. Let the poor, seeing her, be drawn to Christ and invite him to enter their homes and their lives. Let the sick and suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation. Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones.
Mother Teresa

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

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

Thoughts and ideas on religion

Nonfiction, aphoristic, and humorous literature seeks to provide humanity with a method and logic so that, by overcoming stupidity and ignorance, man can organize his life in the best possible way. This is the great existential utopia that elevates this discipline above both science and religion and makes it a true philanthropic practice.
Carl William Brown

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

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
George Bernard Shaw

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

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

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

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

Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.
Matthew Arnold

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

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

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.
William Faulkner

Real Christianity is lovely. There is a quality about a Spirit-filled, radiant Christian that draws and attracts others and causes them to “enjoy favor with all the people.” The truth is that the gospel is not nearly as offensive as some of its proponents!
O. S. Hawkins

Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer… its anti-intellectualism… its puerile hymns… and its faith-healing… are made to order for King Kid America.
Florence E. King

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

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

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.
Thomas B. Macaulay

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

Wherever there are walls I shall inscribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them – I can write in letters which make even the blind see. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.
Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

In England, a country that had never looked favorably on the Catholic religion, censorship of books and pamphlets was abolished in 1692. In Italy, a nation dominated and oppressed by Catholicism, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake a few years earlier, along with Galileo’s accusations of heresy, resulting in the forced abjuration of his theories. This fact alone allows us to appreciate the difference in freedom, tolerance, and common sense between the two nations.
Carl William Brown

Quotes and criticisms on religion

Here I swear, and as I break my oath may eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge. Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again – I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
John Updike

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries, has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
Simone Weil

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

Our religion is itself profoundly sad – a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man’s own language – so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
Charles Baudelaire

The thing with Catholicism, the same as all religions, is that it teaches what should be, which seems rather incorrect. This is “what should be.” Now, if you’re taught to live up to a “what should be” that never existed – only an occult superstition, no proof of this “should be” – then you can sit on a jury and indict easily, you can cast the first stone, you can burn Adolf Eichmann, like that!
Lenny Bruce

It is by far the most elegant worship, hardly excepting the Greek mythology. What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics, and the real presence, confession, absolution, — there is something sensible to grasp at. Besides, it leaves no possibility of doubt; for those who swallow their Deity, really and truly, in transubstantiation, can hardly find any thing else otherwise than easy of digestion.
Lord Byron

In preparation for the Jubilee of 2000, theologians of the Catholic Church are in the mood for major reforms and are preparing epochal changes that will significantly shape the new religion of the third millennium. For example, they have decided to change some words of the Pater Nostrum, and there is no doubt that this innovation will only reinvigorate the spirit and hope of our religious, encouraging them to walk ever more admirably along the path of faith, charity, and holiness; in a word, the path of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race — the individual’s distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety’s or comfort’s sake, to stand well in his neighbor’s eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be, and remain, slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.
Mark Twain

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
Mary McCarthy

Although every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic Church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women’s lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity — an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.
Robin Morgan

It is indolence… Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.
Jane Austen

We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.
John Cheever

Those who marry God can become domesticated too — it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word “Love” means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and “Ave Maria ” like “dearest” is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves — it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.
Graham Greene

A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery.
William Hazlitt

Here, the churches seemed to shrink away into eroding corners. They seem to have ceased to be essential parts of American life. They no longer give life. It is the huge buildings of commerce and trade which now align the people to attention. These in their massive manner of steel and stone say, Come unto me all ye who labor, and we will give you work.
Sean O’Casey

If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they’d realize that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.
Sean O’Casey

The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation; and the reason preaching is so commonly ineffective is, that it often calls on people to work for God rather than letting God work through them.
John Ruskin

A glorious Church is like a magnificent feast; there is all the variety that may be, but every one chooses out a dish or two that he likes, and lets the rest alone: how glorious soever the Church is, every one chooses out of it his own religion, by which he governs himself, and lets the rest alone.
John Selden

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say “I know” instead of “I am learning,” and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.
George Bernard Shaw

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

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

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

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

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

We Americans have the chance to become someday a nation in which all radical stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically. We can become a dynamic equilibrium, a harmony of many different elements, in which the whole will be greater than all its parts and greater than any society the world has seen before. It can still happen.
Shirley Chisholm

Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity — an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.
Hubert H. Humphrey

It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.
Malcolm X

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

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

Though it is very important for man as an individual that his religion should be true, that is not the case for society. Society has nothing to fear or hope from another life; what is most important for it is not that all citizens profess the true religion but that they should profess religion.
Alexis De Tocqueville

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

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

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

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

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

There is but one love of Jesus, as there is but one person in the poor — Jesus. We take vows of chastity to love Christ with undivided love; to be able to love him with undivided love we take a vow of poverty which frees us from all material possessions, and with that freedom we can love him with undivided love, and from this vow of undivided love we surrender ourselves totally to him in the person who takes his place.
Mother Teresa

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

Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?
Ernest Renan

Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him.
Ernest Renan

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

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

Somewhere in the bible it say Jesus hair was like lamb’s wool, I say. Well, say Shug, if he came to any of these churches we talking bout he’d have to have it conked before anybody paid him any attention. The last thing niggers want to think about their God is that his hair kinky.
Alice Walker

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

What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!
William Blake

Institutions – government, churches, industries, and the like – have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
Charles Horton Cooley

Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.
Lewis H. Lapham

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won’t last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.
D. H. Lawrence

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

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails – aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.
Henry David Thoreau

You can also read:

Italian Cooking Recipes
Cooking traditions in Brescia
Tourism Resources Page
Job Opportunities in Tourism
Best restaurants in Italy
Enogastronomia in Italia

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

Italian culinary art colleges

Carl William Brown — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:30:13 +0000

Tortelli Italian dish

Italian culinary art colleges, questions and answers for Italian hospitality students, a complete summary text about the main topics of this kind of school and the Italian gastronomic culture.

1) What must be the foundamental skills of a good Food and Beverage Manager?

Food and beverage managers plan, organize, direct, control and evaluate the operations of restaurants, bars, cafeterias and other businesses that operate serving food and beverage. These kind of professional workers may be employed by restaurants, bars, hotels and resorts etc. Food and beverage managers still require great customer skills but apply management skills ensuring the labour and financial goals of the organization are maintained.

The most important and foundamental professional skills and competence that a good Food and Beverage Manager should have are: a deep operational knowledge of technical methods and processes of production, service, costs control and revenues; conflict resolution skills, ability to work under pressure and good steel nerves, ability to multi-task operations, good organizational skills, leadership skills, good knowledge of two or three foreign languages, qualities of flexibility and adaptability. In addition to all that he/she must have also strong human qualities and must be a good communicator, a quick decision maker, a motivating staff promoter, a skillful organizer and an expert coordinator.

2) Do you know some typical lombard wines? Can you tell something about them?

The winemaking tradition of Lombardy dates back to its settlement by Greek colonist from Athens along the Po river. The climate of Lombardy is varied due to the diverse terrain of the region but is generally considered a “cool” continental climate and it is very favorable to grapes cultivation. The region is known particularly for its sparkling wines made in Oltrepò Pavese and in the Franciacorta; the importance of this last area is given by the exceptional quality of its wines, mainly the whites of the classic method “Champenoise”: a taste fine and delicate, as well as the flavour make of it a superb sparkling wine, present on the tables of the most celebrated restaurants.

Lombardia also produces still red, white and rosé wines made from a variety of local and international grapes including Nebbiolo wines in the Valtellina region, Trebbiano di Lugana white wines produced with the Chiaretto style rosé along the shores of Lake Garda. The wine region currently has 15 Denominazione di origine controllata (DOC), 3 Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG) and 13 Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT) designations. The main cities of the region are Milan, Bergamo and Brescia. In this last town province you can find Franciacorta and Botticino areas, or the Garda zone where important and famous wines are produced.

Italian Students of Culinary art colleges

3) What do you know about ethnic and fusion cuisine?

Ethnic is the adjective form of “ethnos” which can be defined as the people of the same race or nationality who share a distinctive culture. An “ethnic restaurant” or “ethnic food” is a lazy way of saying “food from another country I’m not used to eating.” Eventually, if you like the food/restaurant enough and begin to eat it regularly, it sheds the “ethnic” label and you just call it the type of food/restaurant that it is. I never understood why people can’t just call it what it is from the get go. Every dish is ethnic. The so-called “ethnic” restaurants may seem a logical outgrowth of the waves of immigration to the United States and Europe from India, China, South America and Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the result of faster and faster travel possibilities and world wide globalization. The food served in ethnic restaurants often constitutes a distinct cuisine.

In all cultures and contexts, there are some foods that are almost exclusively eaten in restaurants and others that never are. (For example, one would have to read a great many U.S. restaurant menus before finding those two staples of the American diet, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and popcorn.) If we consider Indian restaurants in the United Kingdom, we find that by the 1990s, they employed more people (roughly 70,000) than the shipbuilding and steel industries combined. At Ethnique cuisines, we bring you dishes from different ethnicities all over the world. Fusion cuisine combines elements of various culinary traditions while not fitting specifically into any. The term generally refers to the innovations in many contemporary restaurant cuisines since the 1970s. Fusion cuisine blends the culinary traditions of two or more nations to create innovative and sometimes quite interesting dishes. It tends to be more common in culturally diverse and metropolitan areas, where there is a wider audience for such food.

4) How could be composed a typical Lombard Menu?

Lombardy is characterized by a high-quality tourist offer, consisting of lakes, rivers, mountains, cities of art, oenogastronomy, sport and leisure. An area that stretches from the Alps to the Oltrepò and includes the great lakes, large hilly areas and a plain that has been used for agriculture since ancient times can’t help but be an inexhaustible supply of delicious specialities for gourmets. Therefore, it is not by chance that this region has over 250 traditional specialities including cheeses, cold meats, vegetables, cakes and biscuits, without counting the DOC wines which are the pride of whole areas.

There are also many delicious dishes, typical of a culinary tradition that has improved over time, and that today boasts dishes that are famous the whole world over, from “cotoletta alla milanese” (veal cutlets in breadcrumbs) to saffron risotto, from “pizzoccheri della Valtellina” (buckwheat pasta with cheese and vegetables) to “mostarda di frutta cremonese” (fruit pickles from Cremona); from pumpkin tortelli from Mantua to “casonsèi bergamaschi” (a type of homemade pasta), to sweet things such as “torrone cremonese” (nougat from Cremona) to “torta sbrisolona” (a nutty, biscuit type cake) from Mantua, a delight for all those who have a sweet tooth. Therefore a typical menu could be: Rosettes of bresaola (cured raw beef), Risotto at the Milanese, Agnolotti with Bitto cheese and porcini mushroom sauce, Perch with sage, Veal chops in sauce, Potato croquettes, stewed peas, Stuffed apples. In this region we can also have a wide selection of wines such as Valcalepio white wine; Franciacorta red ; Lugana white or San Colombano red ; Oltrepo Pavese and sweet Muscat.

Typical Lombard recipe

5) What do you know about Fast Food and Takeaway restaurants?

Fast food also known as Quick Service Restaurant or QSR within the industry itself, is the term given to food that can be prepared and served very quickly. While any meal with low preparation time can be considered to be fast food, typically the term refers to food sold in a restaurant or store with low quality preparation, preheated or precooked ingredients, and served to the customer in a packaged form for take-out/take-away. The term “fast food” was recognized in a dictionary by Merriam–Webster in 1951. Precooked foods such as french fries or pizza typically must be used within a few hours, or they become dried out and unpalatable. The restaurant must balance availability with the expected numbers of customers, to avoid discarding unused expired product.

Similarly, the food itself is often intended to be consumed quickly, using strong contrasts such dry corn chips with greasy or wet toppings that will combine into a gooey mess if stored for later consumption. Outlets may be stands or kiosks, which may provide no shelter or seating, or fast food restaurants (also known as quick service restaurants). Franchise operations which are part of restaurant chains have standardized foodstuffs shipped to each restaurant from central locations. The capital requirements involved in opening up a fast food restaurant are relatively low. Restaurants with much higher sit-in ratios, where customers tend to sit and have their orders brought to them in a seemingly more upscale atmosphere, may be known in some areas as fast casual restaurants.

In areas which had access to coastal or tidal waters, ‘fast food’ would frequently include local shellfish or seafood, such as oysters or, as in London, eels. Often this seafood would be cooked directly on the quay or close by. The development of trawler fishing in the mid nineteenth century would lead to the development of a British favourite fish and chips partly due to such activities. British fast food had considerable regional variation. Sometimes the regionality of dish became part of the culture of its respective area. The content of fast food pies has varied, with poultry (such as chickens) or wildfowl commonly being used. After World War II, turkey has been used more frequently in fast food. A particularly British form of fast food is the sandwich, popularised by John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich in 1762 when he wrapped dried meat in bread so as not to interrupt his work or his gambling (accounts vary).

6) What do you know about August Escoffier and why is he so world wide known?

Georges Auguste Escoffier (28 October 1846 – 12 February 1935) was a French chef, restaurateur and culinary writer who popularized and updated traditional French cooking methods. He is a legendary figure among chefs and gourmets, and was one of the most important leaders in the development of modern French cuisine. Much of Escoffier’s technique was based on that of Antoine Carême, one of the codifiers of French haute cuisine, but Escoffier’s achievement was to simplify and modernize Carême’s elaborate and ornate style. Referred to by the French press as roi des cuisiniers et cuisinier des rois (“king of chefs and chef of kings”), Escoffier was France’s pre-eminent chef in the early part of the 20th century. Escoffier’s greatest innovations were in menu planning.

For hundreds of years, doinners had been served in the style called à la francaise, with a large number of different dishes set out on the table at once. Service à la Russe is the practice we know today of serving dishes consequently rather than simultaneously. Alongside the recipes he recorded and invented, another of Escoffier’s contributions to cooking was to elevate it to the status of a respected profession by introducing organized discipline to his kitchens. He organized his kitchens by the brigade de cuisine system, with each section run by a chef de partie. Escoffier’s reorganization into parties, each dependent on the pothers, made the work in the kitchen co-ordinated and well controlled. Escoffier published Le Guide Culinaire, which is still used as a major reference work, both in the form of a cookbook and a textbook on cooking. Escoffier’s recipes, techniques and approaches to kitchen management remain highly influential today, and have been adopted by chefs and restaurants not only in France, but also throughout the world.

Italian Restaurant

7) What do you know about Pellegrino Artusi and why is he so world wide known?

Pellegrino Artusi (1820–1911) was the author of the famous Italian cookbook “The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well. Artusi was born in Forlimpopoli, a town near Forlì, and made his fortune as a silk merchant, but after retiring devoted himself to fine dining. In 1891, at age 71, he completed his famous cookbook, but could not find a publisher. So he used his own money to self-publish, selling a thousand copies of the first edition in four years. Soon, however, the cookbook caught on, and before Artusi died in Florence in 1911, more than 200,000 copies had been sold. Filled with amusing anecdotes as well as recipes, the book is a perennial best seller in Italy, and has been translated in Spanish, Dutch, German and English.

In 1904 Artusi published a practical manual for the kitchen, with over 3,000 recipes and 150 tables, simply entitled “Here is your cookbook” with the anonymous participation and influence of the baroness Giulia Turco. Writing only two decades after the unification of Italy, Artusi was the first to include recipes from all the different regions of Italy in a single cookbook. He is often credited with establishing a truly national Italian cuisine for the first time. Still today his main literary work counts a great number of editions and widespread diffusion. It collects 790 receipts, from broth to liqueurs, passing through soups, hors-d’ouvres (or well beginners), second dishes and cakes. The approach is a didactic one, the receipts are followed by the author’s reflections and anecdotes, as he writes in az witty style. The kitchen science and the art of well eating was a real boundary line in the gastronomic culture of the age.

8) What is a kitchen brigade and where can we find it?

Late in the 19 th Century, the ingenious chef Georges Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935) created the modern brigade system while working in London at the Savoy Hotel, even though evidence of brigade-style culinary arrangements can be found in late medieval French and English sources. For getting the utmost efficiency, he organized the kitchen as a strict hierarchical ladder of authorities and functions. This structured team system delegates responsibilities to different individuals that specialize in certain tasks.

At the top of this ladder we find the Head Chef (Chef de cuisine) who coordinates and supervises the kitchen activities, establishes the standards, works out the prices on the menu and so on. He also directs the trainees on work experience. The size of the kitchen brigade usually depends on the type of restaurant and the food that is served. Due to the high costs involved in employing a large staff, many food establishments now expect much more flexibility from a smaller kitchen brigade. Another factor in kitchen staff reduction is the dramatic impact that technology and standardisation have had on the industry process. In any case luxury hotels and first-class restaurants around the globe still employ large brigades because they must provide efficiency and personalised service which are necessary for the standards of their clientele.

Hotel Garda Lake

9) What are the main roles of a head chef and the duties of an under chef?

The Kitchen chef (Chef de cuisine) is responsible for overall management of kitchen. He supervise staff, create menus and new recipes with the assistance of the restaurant manager, make purchases of raw food items, train apprentices and maintain a sanitary and hygienic environment for the preparation of food. He must have the ability to organise duties and solve any problems that may arise in kitchen daily operations. He is not just a cook, but he is a head cook, which implies a higher level of prestige. Depending on the skill, training and perserverance, a chef can climb the ranks and gain more prestige and responsability. many famous chefs have planned their own progress and worked in some of the most notorious restaurants under some of the most renowned chefs in the world until they, too, became skilled and well-known.

The Head chef is assisted by an under chef (sous-chef de cuisine), who supervises how the food is prepared, portioned and arranged according to the head chef’s directions. The Deputy kitchen chef receives orders directly from the chef de cuisine for the management of the kitchen and often represents the chef de cuisine when he or she is not present.Subordinate are the section chefs (chefs de partie); each one is in charge of the preparation of particular food and dishes. All this staff makes up the kitchen brigade, of course the number of the section chefs depends on the size and the class of the restaurant as well as the number of assistants.

10) What does the acronym HACCP mean and what it is used for?

HACCP is the acronym of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point which is a systematic preventive approach to food safety and pharmaceutical safety that addresses physical, chemical, and biological hazards as a means of prevention rather than finished product inspection. HACCP is used in the food industry to identify potential food safety hazards, so that key actions, known as Critical Control Points (CCPs) can be taken to reduce or eliminate the risk of the hazards being realized. The system is used at all stages of food production and preparation processes including packaging, distribution, etc.

A critical control point means a point, step or procedure in a food process at which a control measure can be applied, and at which control is essential, to prevent, reduce or eliminate and identified food hazard. This method was applied for the first time in the USA in 1971 by the NASA when the Pillsbury firm accepted to make the food for astronauts and wanted to produce it being very careful with the maximun precautions, in order to assure the safety of the food and the astronauts themselves. This method is nowadays applied everywhere since customer health safety is extremely important, and therefore proper hygiene in the food and beverage industry must be treated with the utmost respect and attention.

Italian grilled chicken

11) What are the seven steps to develop a HACCP plan?

In order to develop a good and healthily prevention system in the food processing industry an accurate HACCP plan must be elaborated and written; this document delineates all the procedures to be followed during food preparation in every kitchen. Once the plan has been prepared, it is necessary to validate and verify that the plan works after it is implemented. there are seven principles which are used to develop and implement a HACCP plan. These seven parts are: 1. Analyse Hazards. Everyone who works in the catering industry must be aware of the hazards associated with food and drinks. Hazards can be biological (i.e. microbe), chemical (i.e. pesticides) or physical (i.e. metal fragment) 2. Identify Critical Control Point.

These are the stages, or points, in the food production process where hazards should be controlled or eliminated. 3.Establish Preventive Measures with critical limits for each control point. This should be for any cooked food. (i.e. determining the minimun cooking temperature). 4. Establish Procedures. To monitor the critical control points. This could include deciding how cooking time and temperature should be supervised and who is responsible. 5. Establish Corrective Actions. To be taken when monitoring which shows that a critical limit has not been met. 6. Establish Procedures. To verify the system is working properly. 7. Establish an Effective System. In order to record information to document HACCP system.

12) Can you classify what are the main types of restaurants, with their food, clients and price range?

Restaurants are classified on the kind of food, type of clients and price range. Therefore wowadays we can have all the different range of food establishments, since in the 20th Century with the development of commerce, business, technolgy and a huge immigration flow, we can have a large variety of offers, of dishes, of menus and of culinary different traditions. We can have: Fast-Food Restaurants, Coffe Shops and Self-Service Restaurants, here the price range is inexpensive and the customers are mainly clerks, students, teachers, families and so on, the food is often precooked or prepared in advance, here you can find soups, pasta, metas, vegetables, desserts, or pizza, hamburgers, french fries, soft drinks, sandwiches, hot and cold drinks, ice cream, snack items, and so on.

Then we can have Hotel Restaurant in which the food, the price and the clients are based on the hotel category, or Ethnic Restaurant where you can find international food such as Chinese, Mexican, Brazilian, Indian, all different kinds of clients and the price range varies from inexpensive to average, finally we can have Speciality Restaurant and Gourmet Restaurant, here you can find speciality cuisine or top quality and elaborate dishes, you can also find all types of clients, from families to VIPs, business clients, celebrities, conference delegates, wealthy people etc. and also the prices varies, from average to expensive and very expensive.

Italian Garda lake wine

13) What is the origin of the term “Menu”, what are the main types of menus and what features should a good menu have?

The word menu, like much of the terminology of cuisine, is French in origin. It ultimately derives from Latin minutus, something made small; in French it came to be applied to a detailed list or résumé of any kind. So originally menus were just list of food that could be raw or cooked, then in 19th Century individual menus were introduced and the food was divide into courses. Nowadays in restaurants, a menu is a printed brochure or public display on a poster or chalkboard that shows the list of options for a diner to select. A menu may be a la carte -in which guests choose from a list of options – or table d’hôte or carte du jour, in which case a pre-established sequence of courses is served, then nowadays we can have coffee shop menus. In the 2000s, many fast food restaurants switched to digital menus which are displayed on flat-screen LCD televisions. Depending on the restaurant, the menu may display a list of wines and their prices, or this information may be available in a separate brochure called the wine list.

Some restaurants may also have separate menus for beer, liquor, and mixed drinks, and for desserts. A good menu should be planned considering a lot of different steps, such as: analyse the potential customer, location of the establishment, the price and cost of food, the staff skill and size, availability of food and reliability of suppliers, time of the year, festivity days, time of the day, number and sequences of courses, nutritional value, last but not least the language. The numbers of courses and the number of dishes may vary depending on the size and type of restaurant, but you must always remember that a menu often influences the customer, so when designing menus, chefs and restaurateurs have to try to appeal to certain marketr segments and they must also create the right atmosphere of the restaurant with decor, furniture and uniforms.

14) Can you explain what is a function and what are the main steps you must follow to organize it well?

A function can be described as the service of food and drink at a specific time and place, for a given number of people at a known price. We can have social functions, such as weddings, anniversaries, dinner dances, seminars; then we can have Business functions, such as conferences, meetings, working lunches, working dinners or finally we can have Social and Business functions such as corporate entertaining. Sometimes these functions are also called banquets, even if this term is used to describe a large formal occasion. The variety of functions events ranges from simply providing bar facilities in a conference reception area before or during the meeting, to the more formal occasion catering for up to one or two thousand people. Function catering is found in the commercial and public sector of the Hospitality Industry. Policy decisions are determined by a number of features concerning type of catering. A caterer usually gets information of the function in advance. This includes: number of guests; price per couvert; menu requirements; drink required; type of menu.

This information allows the manager to assess the resource requirements, for example: staffing, linen, food and drink, equipment. As a consequence the manager can assess the profit margins to be achieved. Marketing considerations must also be taken into account, in fact the function manager should be aware of the competing companies working in the same area and he should have information of other establishments in order to differentiate the offer. The relationship between price and value for money is an important aspect of pricing. Value for money refers not only to the food but to many other factors such as the atmosphere, décor and the level of service and so on. The function manager must plan every aspect, such as the timing of the function, the room layouts, the staff organization, the choice of menu (vegetarian or allergy requirements), types of service, flowers and centrepieces, cloakroom requirements, techinal requirements and so on.

Terme di Sirmione Brescia Italy

15) What do you know about “function catering” and more precisely about organizing Buffets and Banquets?

The terms “buffets” and “banquets” can be summed up with the term “Function catering”. This refers to the request for the supply of food and beverage to people celebrating special events, such as wedding receptions, cocktail parties, business congresses and meetings, stag parties, hen parties and so on. The type of meal chosen largely depends on the degree of formality required, even if the success of a good banquet or buffet mainly relies on the impeccable organization and attention to every detail (floral table pieces, decorations, elegant clothing, china, silverware, glassware). Nowadays in large establishments, provided with banqueting suites or banqueting halls, there is a permanent staff exclusively in charge of the organization of function catering.

The trend is certainly towards buffets rather than endless formal sit down meals and this function is ideal for large number of guests. The customers either help themselves or are served by waiters standing behind the buffet table. What’s more clients prefer to devote less time to eating and leave more time to entertainment. Light and balanced menus, three courses instead of five, are therefore naturally preceded by an aperitif and a buffet. The arrangement of a buffet must be so to highlight all the different food items, and before anything else it has to attract the guests’ attention fo its beauty. The cold buffet can be considered, without any doubt, a new and modern form of catering, it replaces the large meals of the past and allows the tasting of many food specialities.

The food items in a cold buffet can be endless, we can have assorted hot appetisers (savoury patties, or small pizzas, etc), sea food (cold lobster, shrimp cocktails, scampi mousse), fresh water and sea fish, cold beef, veal and pork, mixed salads, desserts, patisserie, fruts, etc. As for the drinks, the service starts with the aperitifs then the white wine is served, both dry and sweet, and high quality red wines, followed by sparkling wines or champagne, then ending with coffee, whiskey or any other suitable cocktail. Among function catering we can have: cocktail buffet, brunch, slunch, the buffet lunch that can also offers hot dishes, the country buffet that can offer country products and the dinner buffet that offers also hot dishes. (pizzas, scones, turnovers, puff, pies, quiches, or cream guns, fresh fruit tatelettes, donuts, cream beignet, etc).

16) What do you know about the Victorian Period and its innovations?

The Victorian era represented the height of the Industrial Revolution, a period of significant social, economic, and technological progress in the United Kingdom where the theories of Jeremy Bentham, Carl Mark and Charles Darwin were spreading about. Victoria’s reign was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire; during this period it reached its zenith, becoming the foremost global power of the time. During the reign of Queen Victoria Britain emerged as the most powerful trading nation in the world, provoking a social and economic revolution whose effects are still being felt today. Since the latter part of the eighteenth century the process of industrialisation had built a firm foundation for nineteenth century growth and expansion.

Italian Salami tradition

At the heart of this was the successful development and application of steam technology. Like the steamship, the railway predates the Victorian era. By 1845 2441 miles of railway were open and 30 million passengers were being carried. The building of the railway network was the major achievement of the Victorian period, changing for ever both social patterns and the landscape of Britain. Other useful inventions of this period were the Telephone, the Radio, the Refrigerator, the Toilet, the Camera, the Sewing Machine, the Stamps and the Vacuum Cleaner. There were also significant improvements for food preservation and the first “canned food” like dried soups and chemicals appeared. (Pasteur’s theories).

17) What was a typical Victorian Menu?

During Victorian times the diet of most people began to improve: the invention of steam ship and of refrigeration meant that meat, fish and fruit could be imported! People could begin to eat shellfish, poultry, game, cheeses but also exotic fruit (peaches, pineapples, etc.). The cooks were especially prized for their dessert-making skills-puddings, cakes, etc.

The Victorian period was an epoch of compromise: progress and poverty; corruption and moralism. For the Victorian Upper-classes the woman planned lunch and evening meals (the largest one). She had a cook that did the work for her. They ate 5-6 courses when they were alone; 12-13 when there were guests. “Supper” was the Victorian mid-night snack.

The Afternoon tea served to show off the lady’s finest silver, china and linen. A typical Victorian Menu was composed by Soup, Roast Turkey with dressing or Roast Pork with potatoes or Chicken Fricassee served with rice, Two vegetable side dishes, Citrus ice, Jam, jellies and sweet pickles, and to end Cake and preserved fruit with Coffee, hot punch and water. Wine was served at the end of each course. Madeira and sherry after. Breakfast could be done with scones, fruits, omelettes, bacon and more.

Villa dei Cedri Park Verona

18) What are your favorite Italian and Lombardy recipes?

ASPARAGUS RICE (Risotto agli asparagi)

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups Italian rice (Risotto Arborio)
1/2 cup salted butter, or 1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tablespoon dried parsley
1 whole red onion (chopped)
5?6 cups chicken stock
20 asparagus spears
1/4 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic (minced)
8 Tablespoon parmigiano cheese (grated)

PREPARATION METHOD:

Rice Preparation: In a sauce pan, melt butter or add 1/4 cup olive oil. Add onions and parsley. Cook until onion is transparent.
Turn heat to high, add rice. Add 3 ladles of hot chicken stock into rice, stir constantly until liquid is absorbed. Continue adding stock (3 ladles at
a time) and stir until rice is tender. Rice should be sticky and no liquid should remain. Rice should be firm like putting or custard. Put rice aside.
Asparagus Preparation: In a fry pan, add 1/4 cup olive oil and garlic. Cook until garlic is golden. Cut asparagus into 1 inch diagonal pieces, leave 5?6 spears uncut, will be used for garnish. On medium/high setting, cook asparagus (both cut & whole) uncovered for 3 minutes. Add 1/4 cup chicken stock, salt & pepper to taste.
Continue cooking covered until tender. Final Preparation: Add asparagus to rice. Place back on stove, add the cheese and stir. Add more cheese if desired.
Place rice on a serving dish and garnish with whole cooked asparagus spears.

GRILL POACHED WHITEFISH (Coregone-Lavarello- grigliato al cartoccio)

INGREDIENTS:

2 lbs. boned whitefish fillets
1 med. onion
1 med. lemon
salt
pepper
butter

PREPARATION METHOD:

Sprinkle both sides of fillets generously with butter buds. Lay fillets singly on individual sheets of aluminum foil. Cover with onion rings and salt and pepper to taste. Cover onion rings with several full slices of lemon, peel included. Wrap in foil and place on charcoal grill or in broiler oven for 5-6 minutes on each side. Discard cooked lemon slices when foil opened. Decorate plate with fresh lemon slices and fresh parsley.

Garda Lake Fish Dish

GRILLED WHITEFISH WITH SAUCE (Coregone-Lavarello- grigliato con salsa)

PREP: 5 min, Cook: 10 min.

INGREDIENTS:

1/3 cup mayonnaise type salad dressing
1 Tbs. sweet pickle relish
1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
1 tsp. lemon juice
4 whitefish fillets, or haddock or orange roughy fillets, about 6 ounces each

PREPARATION METHOD:

Prepare grill (medium heat). Combine first 3 ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Set aside. Combine butter and lemon juice in a separate bowl. Mix well. Arrange fish on grill and brush with butter mixture. Grill fish 5 inches from heat source 6-8 minutes, or until fish flakes with a fork, turning once and brushing occasionally with butter mixture. Serve with sauce.

https://www.tasteatlas.com/ TasteAtlas is an online experiential travel guide and encyclopedia for traditional food, cataloging over 10,000 dishes, drinks, and ingredients from around the world. It is essentially a global food map designed to help users discover local, authentic dishes and restaurants.Here is what you should know about the site:Key FeaturesInteractive Food Map: You can explore cities, regions, and countries to see what traditional foods are popular there.Database of Dishes & Restaurants: It features descriptions of dishes, ingredients, and recommended restaurants, including local favorites and traditional eateries. Ratings & Reviews: Users can rate dishes and submit information, contributing to the platform’s ranking system.Lists & Awards: TasteAtlas is famous for its annual awards, such as “Best Traditional Dishes,” “Best Cuisines,” and “Best Food Cities”, which are often widely shared. Best Cuisine: In the TasteAtlas Awards 2025/2026, Italy was ranked as the No. 1 cuisine in the world, followed by Greece, Peru, Portugal, and Spain.Best Food Cities: Naples, Italy, was named the best food city in the world for 2026.

https://www.budgetbytes.com Budget Bytes is a popular, highly-rated recipe website created by Beth Moncel, focusing on delicious, nutritious, and simple meals designed for tight budgets. It offers step-by-step photos, price-calculated recipes, and meal-prepping strategies, making it ideal for beginners looking to save money without sacrificing flavor.Key aspects of Budget Bytes include: Affordable Focus: Recipes are designed to reduce food waste, often turning leftovers into new meals. High-Yield & Prep-Focused: Provides recipes geared towards the average pantry, alongside weekly meal plans with grocery lists via Budget Bytes+.Transparency: As of 2020, they began adding limited nutritional data to recipes. Accessibility: Recipes use standard, affordable ingredients (like Walmart’s Great Value brand) and common household kitchen equipment, says a Budget Bytes YouTube short. While many find the recipes cost-effective, some users note that exact ingredient prices can vary, according to Reddit reviews.

You can also read:

Quotes on fashion and style

The post Italian culinary art colleges first appeared on The World of English.

Fashion and style trends

Carl William Brown — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:22:35 +0000

Fashion and style trends

Fashion and style trends, an article that describes a short history of fashion and the different style trends through the centuries with quotes and references.

Fashion is always changing mainly because culture, research and stupidity never stand still.
Carl William Brown

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
Oscar Wilde

We are but a day in this world, and in that day the fashion is changed a thousand times: all seek liberty, yet all deprive themselves of it.
Dante Alighieri

Fashions fade, style is eternal.
Yves Saint Laurent

In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.
Jean Baudrillard

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana

Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly “eaten up” by the Fashion being heralded.
Roland Barthes

What is called fashion is the tradition of the moment. All tradition carries with it a certain necessity for people to put themselves on a level with it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I don’t believe in fashion. I believe in costume. Life is too short to be same person every day.
Stephanie Perkins

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
Coco Chanel

Most fashionable ladies are as diamonds because they are more costly than useful.
William Scott Downey

Change of fashions is the tax which industry imposes on the vanity of the rich.
Nicolas Chamfort

We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.
Yves Saint Laurent

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
E. H. Chapin

No fashion is ever a success unless it is used as a form of seduction.
Christian Dior

Fashion is predicated on the fear that the naked body, divested of signs, is incapable of authority.
Christian Thorne

Fashion through history

The history of fashion and costume, as means of self-expression, has been with us since humans began to clothe themselves. The history of fashion dates back to the Egyptians, whose burial sites have provided historians with plenty of well-preserved costumes, jewels, artifacts and tools. However, the Renaissance is the time some historians identify with the beginning of the history of fashion. As people grew more self-aware, clothing, and in particular fashionable clothing, became of increasing importance during the Renaissance.

Fashion, once purely a pastime of the rich, also became a preoccupation of the prosperous middle class. During the Middle Ages clothes had become distinct from country to country, but the Renaissance had a more unifying effect on fashion. Clothes were made by tailors to match a customer’s requests and it was common for a client to pay several visits to a tailor for just a single item of clothing.

Tailors began to form business networks of closely related trades in specific regions of towns and cities. In London, the area of London Bridge housed the first haberdashers. A tailor’s shop, work rooms and home were all located on one site. Travelling tailors serviced country folk who did not have access to urban countries.

Fashion, clothing that is in style at a particular time. The concept of fashion implies a process of style change, because fashions in dress, as well as in furniture and other objects, have taken very different forms at different times in history. Thus, when English playwright William Shakespeare observed in the 16th century that “the fashion wears out more apparel than the man,” he meant that clothing becomes unfashionable long before it has worn out.

Back in Shakespeare’s day, only upper-class people dressed fashionably; the mass of the rural peasantry wore simple clothing that hardly changed over many generations. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, fashions have changed rapidly. We would look strange indeed if we wore the styles our great-grandparents wore. And most people, at least in the West, follow fashion to some extent, because fashion refers to much more than the haute couture, the exclusive and expensive clothing produced by leading designers.

Fashion and beauty

Even schoolchildren are aware that fashions exist, and change, in running shoes. Nevertheless, we do tend to distinguish, however imprecisely, between basic clothing, such as blue jeans, parkas, and T-shirts, and the latest trendy fashions created by fashion designers. This article follows fashion in the West from its beginnings in Europe to the present. For more information on everyday clothing around the world.

Fashion reflects the society of which it is a part. It has been influenced by wars, conquests, laws, religion, and the arts. Individual personalities have also had an impact on fashion. Royalty and heads of state have set fashion, and in the 20th century media stars have emerged as leaders of fashion. French writer Anatole France said that if he could come back to Earth 100 years after his death and have only one thing to read, he would choose a fashion magazine because that would show him the way people lived.

Fashion also has its critics, who have at times denounced fashion as irrational, frivolous, tyrannical, and immoral. Why should pink be in fashion one season and gray the next season? Why do people follow fashion like sheep when they have enough clothes already? A common accusation is that fashion designers accelerate fashion change to create new business. Yet no new fashion succeeds until people are ready to accept it. The final decision about what to buy, or whether to buy anything at all, belongs to the consumer. Ultimately, fashions change because many people like new and different styles.

In the 1980s Armani and other Italian designers such as Versace, Valentino, Trussardi and Gucci profoundly influenced the cut of men’s suits, fashion, style trends and accessories in general. The Italian look featured a looser, more comfortable fit, using softer materials in neutral colors such as camel. Over the course of the decade, shoulders became broader. Padded shoulders became standard for women as well as for men, a style known as the power look or the executive look. By the 1990s suits had slimmed down again, but they retained the easy elegance that distinguished the Italian look from the stiffer look of East Coast retailers in the United States, such as Brooks Brothers.

Although the suit remained the basic garment of the male wardrobe, the trend was toward more casual dressing. This trend even found its way into the workplace with the introduction of casual Fridays by many companies. In some companies the dressing down of casual Fridays now extends throughout the week. The business suit shows few signs of disappearing in western Europe and Japan, however.

Men’s fashion

As dress has become less formal, men have become increasingly concerned with style, color, and patterns in their clothing. Participation in sports has also influenced men’s clothing. To begin with, it has increased the size of the male wardrobe: golf, tennis, and skiing, for example, require specific apparel. Beyond this, a growing emphasis has been placed on functionalism in clothing. Athletic shoes, for example, are worn on the street, as well as during athletic activities. Today many top fashion designers have casual sportswear lines, for example the Emporio Armani line by Armani, that include casual items such as sweatshirts.

The most formal attire that most men ever wear is the dinner jacket or tuxedo, black trousers, a tie and cummerbund of black satin or grosgrain, and a white shirt. A white jacket is substituted during the summer. The tuxedo underwent stylistic changes in the 1960s, when designers began to produce dinner jackets in colors other than black or white. These jackets were worn with ruffled shirts and wide butterfly ties. This flamboyance in eveningwear tended to disappear in the 1990s, although teenagers still often rented tuxedos for their formal school dances.

Today, celebrity is more significant than social status in establishing fashion leadership. Musicians, actors, sports figures, and other performers frequently launch or popularize new fashions. The role of fashion leader has also been assumed by the manufacturers of men’s apparel, who through advertising and public relations techniques are able to acquaint millions of men with a new fashion idea in a matter of weeks.

In the past, ordinary people wore the same styles for years. Teenagers generally dressed the same as adults. In modern times, though, fashions began to change at least every year. Today, new styles appear every few months! So why do fashions change? Social and economic factors have played a big part. Teen fashion began to develop after the Second World War. In the 1950s teenagers and twenty-somethings had money and leisure time. They could choose and buy their own clothes. As consumers, they had a big influence on fashion trends.

Favourite styles in the 1950s included tight trousers and skinny ties for the boys. Girls often wore an over-sized jumper/sweater, or cardigan, and a ‘: long tweed skirt to match, or loose rolled-up jeans. Synthetic, easy-care, man-made fabrics like polyester were popular. Music has also been a major influence on youth fashion since the birth of rock’n’roll in 1951. In the 1960s the Beatles popularised Beatle boots, tight-fitting, ankle-high boots with a pointed toe. Rock groups made the hippie look fashionable. Young men grew their hair long. Girls wore long, loose-fitting ankle-length dresses and maxi skirts, headscarves and long necklaces. They dressed in vintage clothes and copied traditional folk styles.

Men fashion and style

In the 1970s and 80s, celebrities like David Bowie became fashion icons. Bowie was the symbol of the glam-rock era. He wore shocking clothes, make-up and hairstyles. Artists designed and made clothes especially for him, so they always fitted him perfectly. He was a pioneer of androgynous fashions, styles that both boys and girls can wear.

In the 1990s, rock groups made grunge style popular: ripped jeans, flannel shirts, second-hand clothes from a charity shop, and baseball caps worn backwards. Today, teenage styles have become much more varied. Casual clothes are the norm. But style is more about individual expression than being a slave to fashion. The most important thing is to take a trend and make it personal with creative twists.

In the late 1990s the fashion system had become increasingly fragmented into many small style tribes. Designers no longer found it possible to promote a single new look every sea-son. By the end of the 20th century, several trends were identifiable. Retro and ethnic styles remained important. Top European designers such as John Galliano found inspiration in the long ago and far away.

Styles that played with society’s assumptions about sex and gender also connected with young fashion trendsetters. Many professionals in the fashion industry believed that the use of high-tech materials would become increasingly significant in the early 2000s. Teflon coatings on fabrics, for example, resist stains. Techno styles use industrial materials, and they also express a functional aesthetic.

At the turn of the 21st century, experts maintained that fashion’s future was decidedly not futuristic and that there would be no shiny silver uniforms, as imagined by futuristic movies of previous decades. Rather, fashion continued to divide into many concurrent styles, with each consumer free to choose his or her own style from within the available array. Individuality coexisted with a desire to associate oneself with particular trendsetters among the fashion-conscious or among fashion designers.

Woman fashion style

Italy is one of the leading countries in fashion design, alongside France, the United States and the United Kingdom. Fashion has always been an important part of the country’s cultural life and society, and Italians are well known for their attention to dress; la “bella figura”, or “good appearance”, retains its traditional importance. Italian fashion is dominated by Milan, Rome, and to a lesser extent, Florence, with the former two being included in the top 30 fashion capitals of the world. Nonetheless, there are numerous other cities which play an important role in Italian fashion.

Italian fashion is linked to the most generalized concept of “Made in Italy“, a merchandise brand expressing excellence of creativity and craftsmanship. Italian luxury goods are renowned for the quality of the textiles and the elegance and refinement of their construction. Many French, British and American high-top luxury brands (such as Chanel, Dior, Balmain and the main line of Ralph Lauren) also rely on Italian craft factories, located in highly specialized areas in the metropolitan area of Naples and in the centre-north of Italy (Tuscany, Marche, Veneto and Piedmont), to produce parts of their apparel and accessories.

You can also visit:

Watch FashionTV Paris

Fashion and life style

Thoughts on fashion and style

Shopping coolest stores

Best shopping quotes

If you want to find out more:

Galeries Lafayette Paris

Harrod’s London

Destiny New York

Camera della moda Italy