Rumi Quotes
Most people guard against going into the fire, and so end up in it.
Rumi, Jalal al-Din. The Essential Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.
This is one of the rare proverbs dealing with the importance of intelligence and foreknowledge.
There are several different strategies for fighting forest fires. Some argue to let them burn themselves out. Others want to burn old brush regularly under control. Still others want to fight every fire regardless of size. Most communities have not reached any decision on these points and as a result, for most communities, none of the strategies prove effective since none are planned for.
This statement was written when he was writing about landscape gardening. However, it is often quoted because it has such wide generality.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī (Persian: جلالالدین محمد رومی), also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Balkhī (جلالالدین محمد بلخى), Mevlânâ/Mowlānā (مولانا, "our master"), Mevlevî/Mawlawī (مولوی, "my master"), and more popularly simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, Hanafi faqih, Islamic scholar, Maturidi theologian, and Sufi mystic originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran. Rumi's influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions: Iranians, Tajiks, Turks, Greeks, Pashtuns, other Central Asian Muslims, and the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into various formats. Rumi has been described as the "most popular poet" and the "best selling poet" in the United States.
