Rumi Quotes

Listening to the eternal involves a silence within us.

The very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within. Therefore it is said: 'In the midst of silence the secret word was spoken to me'.

Not only a truer knowledge, but a greater power comes to one in the quietude and silence of a mind that, instead of bubbling on the surface, can go to its own depths and listen.

But now I have learned to listen to silence. To hear its choirs singing the song of ages, chanting the hymns of space, and disclosing the secrets of eternity.

When thou standest still from thinking and willing of self, the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed to thee, and so God heareth and seeth through thee. Thine own hearing, willing, and seeing hindereth thee, that thou dost not see nor hear God.

While doing centering prayer, the practice is to let go of any thought or perception. The priority is to be as silent as possible and when that is not possible to let the noise of the thoughts be the sacred symbol for a while, without analyzing them.

As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.

GRINNING, DUCKING MY HEAD FOR BALANCE, I START TO SPIN WILDLY AS I CAN. THAT IS MY FAVORITE DANCE, BECAUSE IT CONTAINS A SECRET. THE FASTER I TWIRL, THE MORE I AM STILL INSIDE. MY DANCE IS ALL MOTION WITHOUT, ALL SILENCE WITHIN. AS MUCH AS I LOVE TO MAKE MUSIC, IT'S THE UNHEARD MUSIC THAT NEVER DIES. AND SILENCE IS MY REAL DANCE, THOUGH IT NEVER MOVES. IT STANDS ASIDE, MY CHOREOGRAPHER OF GRACE, AND BLESSES EACH FINGER AND TOE.

Give yourself completely to the act of listening. Beyond the sounds there is something greater, a sacredness that cannot be understood through thought.

In the silence of our hearts, God speaks of His love; with our silence, we allow Jesus to love us.

The true creativity comes out of sitting silently. When you are so totally quiet that there is no thought, no wave in the ocean of your being, out of this silence comes a different kind of creativity.

The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I alwas identify with the roaring of the diamond wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you've seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.

Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names.

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.

A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean.

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.

Ministers are tempted to join the ranks of those who consider it their primary task to keep other people busy … But our task is the opposite of distraction … how to keep them from being so busy that they can no longer hear the voice of God who speaks in silence.

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.

How can you expect God to speak in that gentle and inward voice which melts the soul, when you are making so much noise with your rapid reflections? Be silent and God will speak again.

God is a pure no-thing, concealed in now and here; the less you reach for him, the more he will appear.

Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot