He has afflicted you from every direction in order to pull you back to the Directionless.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 238)
In spite of all the world's bitterness, you are passionately and shamelessly attached to it.
Know that bitter tribulation is a Mercy!...
The cruelty of Time and of every suffering that exists is easier than distance from God and heedlessness.
For that cruelty will pass, but distance from Him will not. No one possesses good fortune but he who takes to Him an aware spirit.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, pp. 57-58)
God said, "It is not because he is despicable that I delay My gift to him: That very delay is an aid.
His need brought him from heedlessness to Me, pulling him by the hair to My lane.
Were I to satisfy his need, he would go back and immerse himself in that game.
Although he laments to the bottom of his soul: "Oh Thou whose protection is sought!"-- let him weep with broken heart and wounded breast.
For I am pleased by his voice, his saying, "Oh God!" and his secret prayers...
Know for certain that this is the reason the believers suffer disappointment in good and evil.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 243)
Severity is truly awesome, but once you begin to tremble, that awesomeness becomes soft and smooth; for the awesome shape is aimed at the denier -- once you become helpless, it turns into Gentleness and Kindness.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 47)
Like fish we say to the Ocean of Life, "Why didst Thou send up waves and throw us onto the driness of water and clay? Thou possessest such mercy, why didsth Thou give us such torment? Oh, Thy mercilessness is sweeter than the mercy of all the merciful creatures of the world!"...
The answer comes, "Oh fish! True enough, a fish knows the water's worth, loves the sea, and clings to union with it. But his love is not of the same kind, so hot and burning, with such self-abandonment, with such lamentation and weeping of blood, and with such roasting of the liver, as the love of that fish who has been thrown upon dry land by the waves and for a long time struggles and tosses upon the hot earth and burning sand... How should someone who has seen that Ocean find joy in this life?
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, pp. 70-71)
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