Rumi (born Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī) was a 13th-century Persian poet, theologian, scholar, and Sufi mystic. He believed in using poetry and the expressive arts to connect with God. His best-known work is the Maṭnawīye Ma’nawī (Spiritual Couplets), a six-volume poem that has been called “the Quran in Persian.”
This is a list of compelling quotes from Rumi’s works on love and healing. Theses Rumi quotes can be used as a therapeutic tool for clients to explore their own journey of love, suffering, and healing.
Scroll to the bottom for a printable PDF version of the Rumi quotes on cards.
For more powerful quotes, see 25 Powerful Quotes from the Dalai Lama and 25 Powerful Quotes About Addiction & Recovery.
25 Powerful Rumi Quotes on Love & Healing
1. Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
2. Love risks everything and asks for nothing.
3. Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love.
4. Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.
5. You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.
6. You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?
7. Why do you stay in prison, when the door is so wide open?
8. As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
9. It’s your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.
10. Look at the moon in the sky, not the one in the lake.
11. Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
12. You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.
13. Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.
14. The rose’s rarest essence lives in the thorns.
15. Your heart is the size of an ocean. Go find yourself in its hidden depths.
16. The cure for pain is in the pain.
17. Within tears, find hidden laughter. Seek treasures amid ruins.
18. These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.
19. In the blackest of your moments, wait with no fear.
20. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
21. Shine like the whole universe is yours.
22. When the light returns to its source, it takes nothing of what it has illuminated.
23. Return to the root of the root of your own soul.
24. When will you begin that long journey into yourself?
25. Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.
