Shut your eyes so the heart may become your eye, and with that vision look upon another world. If you can step away from your need for self-approval, all that you do, top to bottom, will be approved.
Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?
As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Where the lips are silent the heart has a thousand tongues.
Your body is away from me, but there is a window open from my heart to yours.
Look at the moon in the sky, not the one in the lake.
You sit here for days saying, this is a strange business. You’re the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.
Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey!
My friend, the sufi is the friend of the present moment. To say tomorrow is not our way.
Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure.
It is God’s kindness to terrify you in order to lead you to safety.
This discipline and rough treatment are a furnace to extract the silver from the dross. This testing purifies the gold by boiling the scum away.
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.
Paradise is surrounded by what we dislike; the fires of hell are surrounded by what we desire.
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.
Know that a word suddenly shot from the tongue is like an arrow shot from the bow. Son, that arrow won’t turn back on its way; you must damn the torrent at its source.
Since in order to speak, one must first listen, learn to speak by listening.
How should Spring bring forth a garden on hard stone? Become earth, that you may grow flowers of many colors. For you have been heart-breaking rock. Once, for the sake of experiment, be earth!
You are not just the drop in the ocean. You are the mighty ocean in the drop.
You already have the precious mixture that will make you well. Use it.