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.
I am so small I can hardly be seen. How can this great love be inside me? Look at your eyes. They are small, but they see enormous things.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the paradox of feeling insignificant while being capable of immense love.
In this quote, Rumi expresses a profound observation about the nature of love and perception. He acknowledges his own smallness and seeming insignificance, yet questions how such a vast and powerful love can exist within someone so diminutive. The comparison to the eyes, which are also small yet capable of perceiving great wonders, emphasizes that true depth and significance often lie beyond physical size or stature. Love, in this context, transcends personal limitations and is an expansive force that connects individuals to the universe.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a wedding speech to illustrate the power of love despite life's challenges.
More from Rumi
All quotes βThe Law of Wonder rules my life at last, _x000D_ ...I burn each second of my life to Love _x000D_ Each second of my life burns out in Love _x000D_ In each leaping second Love lives afresh.
Lovers have heartaches _x000D_ That can't be cured by drugs _x000D_ Or sleep, _x000D_ Or games, _x000D_ But only by seeing their beloved.
Every fragile beauty, every perfect forgotten sentence, you grieve their going away, but that is not how it is. Where they come from never goes dry. It is an always flowing spring.
Whatever you keep hidden in your heart, God _x000D_ manifests in you outwardly. Whatever the root of _x000D_ the tree feeds on in secret, affects the bough and _x000D_ the leaf.
Come on sweetheart let's adore one another before there is no more of you and me
Similar quotes
I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.
Alas! for that accursed time They bore thee o'er the billow, From love to titled age and crime, And an unholy pillow! From me, and from our misty clime, Where weeps the silver willow!
It has become necessary for me to have this woman, so as to save myself from the ridicule of being in love with her: for to what lengths will a man not be driven by thwarted desire?
To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
Long after one has forgotten what a woman wore, the memory of her perfume lingers.
That deepest thing, that recognition, that knowledge, that sense of kinship began the first time I saw you,and it is the same now - only a thousand times deeper and tenderer. I shall love you to eternity. I loved you long before we met in this flesh. I knew that when I first saw you. It was destiny. We are together like this and nothing can shake us apart.