My dear heart, never think you are better than others. Listen to their sorrows with compassion. If you want peace, don't harbor bad thoughts, do not gossip and don't teach what you do not know.
In the slaughterhouse of love, they kill only the best, none of the weak or deformed. Don't run away from this dying. Whoever's not killed for love is dead meat.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True love often involves pain and sacrifice, and only the strongest emotions can survive it.
Rumi's quote speaks to the intensity and challenges of love, suggesting that real love demands a fierce vulnerability and strength. It implies that love can be a transformative experience, where only those who endure the struggles and trials of deep affection and connection are truly alive and enriched by it. In the metaphorical 'slaughterhouse,' the weak cannot survive the profound impact of love, and those who shy away from the intensity of emotional experiences are left untouched and unfulfilled.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a wedding toast when discussing the challenges and joys of marriage.
More from Rumi
All quotes βThe Law of Wonder rules my life at last, _x000D_ ...I burn each second of my life to Love _x000D_ Each second of my life burns out in Love _x000D_ In each leaping second Love lives afresh.
Lovers have heartaches _x000D_ That can't be cured by drugs _x000D_ Or sleep, _x000D_ Or games, _x000D_ But only by seeing their beloved.
Every fragile beauty, every perfect forgotten sentence, you grieve their going away, but that is not how it is. Where they come from never goes dry. It is an always flowing spring.
Whatever you keep hidden in your heart, God _x000D_ manifests in you outwardly. Whatever the root of _x000D_ the tree feeds on in secret, affects the bough and _x000D_ the leaf.
Come on sweetheart let's adore one another before there is no more of you and me
Similar quotes
I thought when love for you died, I should die._x000D_ _x000D_ It's dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.
If I'm honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the people I love and care about are living with and struggling with.
You cease to move into yourself, away from others. You give up your antagonism. You begin to move toward others in love. God moved toward you in gracious, outgoing love, and you move toward others in that same outgoing love.
If I said I was madly in love with you, I'd be lying and what's more, you'd know it.
A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire, women will like him.
Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.