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Quotes and ideas on vacation

The post 100 marvellous great quotes first appeared on The World of English.

Thoughts and reflections on vacation

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

Thoughts and reflections on vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different opinions on vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Various ideas on vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opinions and ideas on vacation

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

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

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

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

On the same topic you can also read:

Mountain quotes and aphorisms

Tourism and travels

Thoughts about travelling

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Trip Advisor travels

Top destinations and tours

The Lake District

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Christmas Markets in England

Christmas markets in America

Christmas markets in Italy and Germany

Great inspirational quotes and aphorisms

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

100 gorgeous quotes and aphorisms

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

100 gorgeous quotes and aphorisms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top 100 great universal quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rumi aphorisms and quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wise men argue cases, fools decide them.
Anacharsis

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

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

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

Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Marquis De Sade

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

Osho quotes and aphorisms

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

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

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

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

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

Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much learning does not teach understanding.
Heraclitus

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

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

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

The first wealth is health.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

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

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

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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

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Jiddu Krishnamurti best quotes

Jiddu Krishnamurti reflections

Jiddu Krishnamurti reflections

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

Jiddu Krishnamurti best quotes

Carl William Brown — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:57:47 +0000

Jiddu Krishnamurti best quotes

Jiddu Krishnamurti best quotes, aphorisms, ideas, thoughts and words of wisdom by this great stateless philosopher, orator, and mystic of Indian ethnicity.

A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

A dialogue is very important. It is a form of communication in which question and answer continue till a question is left without an answer. Thus the question is suspended between the two persons involved in this answer and question. It is like a bud with untouched blossoms . . .
Jiddu Krishnamurti

If the question is left totally untouched by thought, it then has its own answer because the questioner and answerer, as persons, have disappeared. This is a form of dialogue in which investigation reaches a certain point of intensity and depth, which then has a quality that thought can never reach.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

A man who says, ‘I want to change, tell me how to’, seems very earnest, very serious, but he is not. He wants an authority whom he hopes will bring about order in himself. But can authority ever bring about inward order? Order imposed from without must always breed disorder.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Action has meaning only in relationship, and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Analysis does not transform consciousness.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

And the point is, is it possible for the mind to be totally free from suffering and yet not become indifferent, callous, irresponsible, but to have that passion, the intensity, the energy that freedom brings, freedom from suffering.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Be a light unto oneself.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Begin where you are. Read every word, every phrase, every paragraph of the mind, as it operates through thought.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Beyond all explanations which a good brain can give, why do we choose the worse and not the better, why hate rather than love, why greed and not generosity, why self-centred activity and not open total action? Why be mean when there are soaring mountains and flashing streams? Why jealousy and not love? Why?
Jiddu Krishnamurti

But if one observes, one will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth, you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

But there’s a sacredness which is not of thought, nor of a feeling resuscitated by thought. It is not recognizable by thought nor can it be utilized by thought. Thought cannot formulate it. But there’s a sacredness, untouched by any symbol or word. It is not communicable. It is a fact.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Depuis des siècles, nous nous faisons alimenter par nos maîtres, par deviennent automatiques. Nous pouvons facilement le constater
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Do not think about yourself, but be aware of the thought, emotion, or action that makes you think of yourself.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree’, or `that is a banyan tree’, the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Do you want to know what my secret is? I don’t mind what happens.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Fear is always in relation to something; it does not exist by itself. There is fear of what happened yesterday in relation to the possibility of its repetition tomorrow; there is always a fixed point from which relationship takes place.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Find out for yourself what are the possesions and ideals that you do not desire. By knowing what you do not want, by elimination, you will unburden the mind, and only then will it understand the essential which is ever there.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something, and it is only such love that can know freedom.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

From innumerable complexities we must grow to simplicity; we must become simple in our inward life and in our outward needs.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

From these prejudices there arises conflict, transient joys and suffering. But we are unconscious of this, unconscious that we are slaves to certain forms of tradition, to social and political environment, to false values.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Happy is the man who is nothing.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, wars and class antagonisms.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Human beings, each one, right through the world, go through great agonies, the more sensitive, the more alert, the more observant, the greater the suffering, the anxiety, the extraordinary sense of insoluble problems.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

I hope that you will listen, but not with the memory of what you already know; and this is very difficult to do. You listen to something, and your mind immediately reacts with its knowledge, its conclusions, its opinions, its past memories. It listens, inquiring for a future understanding.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

I think that will be enough, won’t it?
Jiddu Krishnamurti

If there is no order in your relationship with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbour – whether that neighbour is near or very far away – forget about meditation…
Jiddu Krishnamurti

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you leave the pool you have dug for yourself and go out into the river of life then life has an astonishing way of taking care of you, because then there is no taking care on your part.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you would listen, sir, in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Jiddu Krishnamurti best aphorisms

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either they key or the door to open, except yourself.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

In our relationship with children and young people, we are not dealing with mechanical devices that can be quickly repaired, but with living beings who are impressionable, volatile, sensitive, afraid, affectionate; and to deal with them we have to have great understanding, the strength of patience and love.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love. This space divides man from man, and in it is all the becoming, the battle of life, the agony and fear. Meditation is the ending of this space, the ending of the me.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is a great art to have an abundance of knowledge and experience – to know the richness of life, the beauty of existence, the struggles, the miseries, the laughter, the tears – and yet keep your mind very simple; and you can have a simple mind only when you know how to love.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is love alone that leads to right action. What brings order in the world is to love and let love do what it will.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is only in alert silence that truth can be.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It’s strange that though every experience, state, is utterly different, it is still the same movement; though it seems to change, it is still the changeless.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Love is a state of being, and in that state, the ‘me’, with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions is absent. Love cannot be, as long as the activities of the self, of the ‘me’, whether conscious or unconscious, continue to exist.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Most of us waste this extraordinary thing called life. We have lived forty or sixty years, have gone to the office, engaged ourselves in social activity, escaping in various forms, and at the end of it, we have nothing but an empty, dull, stupid life, a wasted life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Observation without evaluation is the highest form of intelligence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Order cannot possibly be brought about through conformity to a pattern, under any circumstances.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Pain itself destroys pain. Suffering itself frees man from suffering.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don’t know where it will take you.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sorrow is not in death but in loneliness, and conflict comes when you seek consolation, forgetfullness, explanations, and illusions.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The end is the beginning of all things, suppressed and hidden, awaiting to be released through the rhythm of pain and pleasure.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The ending is the beginning, and the beginning is the first step, and the first step is the only step.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is always within the shadow of ignorance. Meditation is freedom from thought and a movement in the ecstasy of truth. Meditation is explosion of intelligence.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The flowering of love is meditation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The mind has to be empty to see clearly.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end – you don’t come to an achievement, you don’t come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The observer is the observed.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The significance of life is living.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The very desire to be certain,to be secure,is the beginning of bondage.It’s only when the mind is not caught in the net of certainty,and is not seeking certainty, that it is in a state of discovery.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The word ‘innocence’ means a mind that is incapable of being hurt.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is no ideal in observation. When you have an ideal, you cease to observe, you are then merely approximating the present to the idea, and therefore there is duality, conflict, and all the rest of it. The mind has to be in the state when it can see, observe. The experience of the observation is really an astonishing state. In that there is no duality. The mind is simply – aware.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To ask the ‘right’ question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem, it is in the problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To look is important. We look to immediate things and out of immediate necessities to the future, coloured by the past. Our seeing is very limited and our eyes are accustomed to near things.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves; and what is important in beginning with ourselves is the intention. It is important to understand that this is our responsibility, yours and mine…
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Truth is more in the process than in the result.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

We are very defensive, and therefore aggressive, when we hold on to a particular belief, a dogmas, or when we worship our particular nationality, with the rag that is called the flag.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young – not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age – and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

We want to make life permanent, but in doing so we go against nature, and there lies our pain. Only the mind which is always moving, without resting places and fixed ideas, can be in tune with life and therefore joyful.
What has validity is your living, not what happens tomorrow.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

What you are the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques and churches become important.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

When there is an abeyance of that, when the reaction is suspended, when there is an interval, then you will find that the new brain acts, and it is only the new brain that can understand, not the old brain.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

When we suffer we have made it into a personal affair. We shut out all the suffering of mankind.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely – the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears – when you give your whole attention to it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

When you once see something as false which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human, then you can never go back to it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

While one is young is the time to investigate, to experiment with everything. The school should help its young people to discover their vocations and responsibilities, and not merely cram their minds with facts and technical knowledge; it should be the soil in which they can grow without fear, happily and integrally.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Why do you want to read others’ books when there is the book of yourself?
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Woke up this morning, rather early, with a sense of a mind that had penetrated into unknown depths. It was as though the mind itself was going into itself, deeply and widely and the journey seemed to have been without movement. And there was this experience of immensity in abundance and a richness that was incorruptible.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You can only be afraid of what you think you know.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn’t react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said. Then, in that interval there is a quietness, there is a silence in which alone there is a comprehension which is not intellectual understanding.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You must look most intimately and discover for yourself; then it is your own, not somebody else’s, not something that you have been told, because there is no teacher and no follower.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

You probably are not related to anything to your wife or your husband.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

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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

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