Come, you are part of me! Separate not the part from the whole! Cling to your whole, for it is great!...
Without me, you will not be delivered...
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, pp. 137-138)
Look at me! If you gaze at anyone else, for certain you are unaware of love for God! Behold the face that has received its radiance from God! Perhaps all at once you may win good fortune from it.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 344)
The old man of your intellect has become accustomed to childishness by being the neighbor of the ego, which is naught but a veil.
Make your intellect the companion of the Intellect of a perfect shaykh, so that your intellect may return from its bad habits...
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 138)
Intellect is a man's wings and feathers. If he lacks intellect, then let him find the intellect of a guide...
Without the key of the intellect, knocking upon God's door is a result of self-will, not sound motives.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 125)
Nothing kills the ego but the shadow of the shaykh: Cling tightly to the skirt of that ego-killer!
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 193)
When you are with a shaykh, you are far from ugliness, traveling night and day in a ship. Protected by the spirit of a spirit-bestower, you sleep in the ship and travel forward.
Do not break with the prophet of your time! Do not rely on your own skills and footsteps! Though you be a lion, if you travel the Path without a guide, you will be a self-seer, astray and contemptible.
Beware! Fly only with the shaykh's wings so that you may behold the aid of his armies! At one moment the wave of his gentleness becomes your wing; at the next, his severity's fire carries you forward...
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 139)
Whoever enters the Way without a guide will take a hundred years to travel a two-day journey... Whoever undertakes a profession without a master becomes the laughingstock of city and town.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 123)
God does not speak to everyone, just as the kings of this world do not speak to every weaver. They appoint ministers and representatives so that through them people may find the way to them. In the same way God has singled out certain servants so that everyone who seeks Him may find Him within them. All the prophets have come for this reason. Only they are the Way.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 122)
Imagining this polluted thing to be a heart, you turn your heart away from the Possessor of the Heart. Do you really allow that this object fascinated by milk and honey can be a heart? ... Does a heart fall in love with property and position and submit itself to this black water and clay, or to fantasies, worshiping them in darkness for the sake of empty talk? The heart is nothing but that Ocean of Light. Is the heart to be the locus for God's vision, and then blind?
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 40)
This man is like Iblis, for his pride and blind imitation make him disdain service to the saint. He says "God is sufficient as an object of my prostration."
Adam answers him, "This prostration is to Him. You see two because you have gone astray and denied."
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 84)
Words are just pretexts. It is the element of sympathy that attracts one man to another, not words. If a man should see a thousand prophetic or saintly miracles, it will profit him nothing if he does not have sympathy with the prophet or saint. It is that sympathetic element that unsettles and disquiets.
(Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of Jalaluddin Rumi, Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of Jalaluddin Rumi, p. 7)
Your old grandmother says, "Maybe you shouldn't go to school. You look a little pale." Run when you hear that. A father's stern slaps are better. Your bodily soul wants comforting. The severe father wants spiritual clarity. He scolds but eventually leads you into the open. Pray for a tough instructor to hear and act and stay within you.
(The Essential Rumi, p. 115)
In their fine exterior you see ascetics, but inwardly -- God does not inhabit the house! For two farthings one can buy three or four assloads of these big ducks!
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, pp. 145-147)
A disciple who is trained by a man of God will have a pure and purified spirit. But he who is trained by an impostor and hypocrite and who learns theory from him will be just like him: despicable, weak, incapable, morose, without any exit from uncertainties, and deficient in all his senses...
You are the disciple and guest of someone who in his vileness will steal away all your attainments. He is not victorious -- how will he make you victorious? He will not give you light, he will make you dark. Since he has no light, how can others receive light through associating with him?... He has no scent or trace of God, but his claims are greater than those of Seth or Adam. The devil himself is embarrassed to appear before him; he keeps on saying, "We are of the saints and even greater."
He steals many of the words of the dervishes, so that people may think he really is someone... He is destitute of the bread and provisions of heaven: God has not thrown him a single bone...
For years disciples have gathered at this door, depending on his promise of a tomorrow that never comes. It takes time for the inward nature of man to become apparent in his great and small affairs: Does a treasure lie under the wall of the body, or do snakes, ants, and dragons make it their abode? When it finally becomes clear that he was nothing, the seeker's life has passed: How will the knowledge profit him then?
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 146)
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