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Coleman Barks Quotes

1937–2026 United States

Coleman Barks (April 23, 1937 – February 23, 2026) was an American poet and former literature faculty member at the University of Georgia. Although he neither spoke nor read Persian, he was a popular interpreter of Rumi, rewriting the poems based on other English translations.

United States
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Random Coleman Barks quote

34 quotes

There is no reality but God,
says the completely surrendered sheik, who is an ocean for all beings.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

What is the body? That shadow of a shadow
of your love, that somehow contains
the entire universe.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Gamble everything for love,
if you are a true human being.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Christ is the population of the world,
and every object as well. There is no room
for hypocrisy. Why use bitter soup for healing
when sweet water is everywhere?

The Essential Rumi (1995)

The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you don't belong with us.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

From Hallaj, I learned to hunt lions, but I became something hungrier than a lion.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

There is a community of the spirit
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future. Forget the future.
I'd worship someone who could do that.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Learn from Ali how to fight
without your ego participating.
God's lion did nothing
that didn't originate
from his deep center.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

I can't stop pointing
to the beauty.
Every moment and place says,
"Put this design in your carpet!"

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded.
Someone sober will worry about events going badly.
Let the lover be.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd's love filling you.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Every object and being in the universe is
a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty,
a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained
by any skin. Every jarful spills and makes the earth
more shining, as though covered in satin.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Do not believe in an absurdity
no matter who says it.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

We talk about this and that. There’s no rest except on these branching moments.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Disputational knowing wants customers.
It has no soul.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

The Essential Rumi (1995)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Coleman Barks (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.