Rumi

❮  Poetry & Prose  ❮  Books / People

“Reason is powerless in the expression of love.”

Jalāl (ad-Dīn Muhammad) Rūmī — more popularly simply known as Rumi — was a hugely influential 13th c. Persian thinker, writer and poet.

♟ |  30th September, 1207, Balkh, Afghanistan.
☠ |  17th December, 1273, Konya, Turkey.

Latterly Rūmī has been described as the best selling poet in the United States of America. His poetry has influenced not only Persian literature, but also the literary traditions of the Ottoman Turkish, Urdu and Pashto languages. We need go no further than the 40 Rules of Love, the recent work of Elif Shafak that depicted both a contemporary disciple of Rūmī and a long distance contemporary love affair.

“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.”
“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.”
“Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.”
“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
“Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.”
“I know you’re tired but come, this is the way.”
“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.”
” Passion makes the old medicine new: Passion lops off the bough of weariness.”
“Passion is the elixir that renews: how can there be weariness when passion is present?”
“Oh, don’t sigh heavily from fatigue: seek passion, seek passion, seek passion!”

❝
Passion makes the old medicine new:
Passion lops off the bough of weariness.
 
Passion is the elixir that renews:
how can there be weariness when passion is present?
 
Oh, don’t sigh heavily from fatigue:
seek passion, seek passion, seek passion!

❞
— Rumi

READING LIST ETC.

WRITERS POETS
PHILOSOPHERS PSYCHOLOGISTS

POLITICAL FIGURES
BOOKS OF FICTIONNON-FICTION BOOKS

I was dead, deader than dead because, I was still alive.
Ways of Escape
— “I was dead, deader than dead because, I was still alive.”

The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history. Moreover, it has never been out of print.
The Prophet
— “If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don’t, they never were.”

The Essential Rumi, by Rumi ~ e.g. ~ “Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”
The Essential Rumi
— “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
 .
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French writer, philosopher and political activist. She is known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.
The Second Sex
1984
1984
Delta of Venus
Delta of Venus
A Room of one's own
A Room of One’s Own
War and Peace is the 1869 novel by Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It is regarded as a classic of world literature. (The novel chronicles the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families.) Tolstoy said War and Peace is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." Tolstoy regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel.
War and Peace
Brave New World (1932) is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley. Set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist (one Bernard Marx). In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number five on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th c.
Brave New World
Beloved is a 1987 novel by the late American writer Toni Morrison. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and, in a survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times, it was ranked the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. The work, set after the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865, was inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, an African American who escaped slavery by crossing the Ohio River to Ohio, a free state. Garner was subsequently captured and decided to kill her infant daughter rather than have her taken into slavery.
Beloved
Moby~Dick
The Grapes of Wrath

ENGLISH LIT.

The English language
“Elizabethan era” / “Love letters”
French in English / Latin in English
Anthology / Chronology / Terminology
Phrases & idioms (with their etymologies)
Literary criticism: analysing poetry & prose
Glossary of works, writers and literary devices:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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