The Forty Rules of Love
Ratings49
Average rating3.6
Abandoned ~p.100. The main protagonist is flat, dreary, and unlikely to get interesting. The alternate-chapter Whirling Dervish stuff is treacly and religiony. Absent a recommendation from a trusted source, this goes in the slush pile. For any friends who trust my tastes: not recommended.
For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet feeling bound to come and quickly go away.
When one speaks ill of God, he speaks ill of himself.
“How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to mind mostly fear and blame, it means there is too much fear and blame welled inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion, so are we.”
Let us choose one another as companions! Let us sit at each other's feet! Inwardly we have many harmonies—think not That we are only what we see.
No matter who we are or where we live, deep inside we all feel incomplete. It's like we have lost something and need to get it back. Just what that something is, most of us never find out. And of those who do, even fewer manage to go out and look for it.
But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die.
Cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour. It happens, and it happens all the time.
It is not the ceremonies or rituals that make a difference, but whether our hearts are sufficiently pure or not.
Loneliness and solitude are two different things. When you are lonely, it is easy to delude yourself into believing that you are on the right path. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror. Remember, only in another person's heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you.
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.
God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.
Despite their seemingly endless differences, all of these people gave off a similar air of incompleteness, of the works in progress that they were, each an unfinished masterwork.
“Real filth is the one inside. The rest simply washes off. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure waters, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.”
The whole universe is contained within a single human being—you. Everything that you see around, including the things you might not be fond of and even the people you despise or abhor, is present within you in varying degrees. Therefore, do not look for Sheitan outside yourself either. The devil is not an extraordinary force that attacks from without. It is an ordinary voice within. If you get to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness both your dark and bright sides, you will arrive at a supreme form of consciousness. When a person knows himself or herself, he or she knows God.
If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. Once you achieve that stage, however, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.
We were all created in His image, and yet we were each created different and unique. No two people are alike. No two hearts beat to the same rhythm. If God had wanted everyone to be the same, He would have made it so. Therefore, disrespecting differences and imposing your thoughts on others is tantamount to disrespecting God's holy scheme
How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.
...all religious wars were in essence a “linguistic problem.” Language, he said, did more to hide than reveal the Truth, and as a result people constantly misunderstood and misjudged one another. In a world beset with mistranslations, there was no use in being resolute about any topic, because it might as well be that even our strongest convictions were caused by a simple misunderstanding. In general, one shouldn't be too rigid about anything because “to live meant to constantly shift colors.”
Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.
“A man who has no time for stories is a man who has no time for God,” he said. “Don't you know that God is the best storyteller?”
...all I can give you is the present moment. That is all I have. But the truth is, no one has more than that. It is just that we like to pretend we do.
“It is never too late to ask yourself, ‘Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within?' “Even if a single day in your life is the same as the day before, it surely is a pity. At every moment and with each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one way to be born into a new life: to die before death.”
By and large over time, pain turns into grief, grief turns into silence, and silence turns into lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans.
You need to keep walking, though there's no place to arrive at. The universe is turning, constantly and relentlessly, and so are the earth and the moon, but it is nothing other than a secret embedded within us human beings that makes it all move.
“A life without love is of no account. Don't ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western.... Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. “Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! “The universe turns differently when fire loves water.”
Average book but did like the message of preaching love (not just tolerance or peaceful coexistence) more than sermons! Reminded me of [a:Khalil Gibran 17337799 Khalil Gibran https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png].
I enjoyed the sections about Shams, but I was far less taken with the modern tale of Ella.
I was ready to add this book to my all-time favorites before the last hundred or so pages. Regardless, I was breathtaken multiple times both before and after that mark. It really left an impression on me.
A profound and enlightening book. Reinforces the concept that belief is all about perspective.
Ella, in mid-life, gets a job as a reader for a literary agency. (Really? Seems pretty unlikely.) And then she doesn't really do her job, but instead strikes up a correspondence with the author of the novel she's supposed to be reading. Meanwhile, she suspects that her husband is sleeping with other women . . .
I enjoyed the intricacies of the plot, weaving a mid-13th Century story about Rumi with Ella's. But Ella's own story stretched credulity for me, and the many points of view of the interior story (the Rumi novel that she has been assigned to read) were off-putting.