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This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

— Coleman Barks The Essential Rumi (1995)

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Poetry

More quotes by Coleman Barks

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)

All Coleman Barks quotes →

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Coleman Barks (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.