Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.
Dance when you're perfectly free.
Gamble everything for love, if you're a true human being.
I closed my mouth and spoke to you in a hundred silent ways.
When I talk of primordial innocence, I hear it in Sufi music with the nay flute. I see it in Coptic icons, in most traditional art, particularly art of the American Indian. I find the texts extraordinarily beautiful and very childlike and very simple. I've been particularly interested in American Indian texts.
Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.
If God did not love us, we could not love him. And Sufis are those who have realized this love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
Our virtues are made by love, and our sins are caused by the lack of it.
When I was a boy in Desuq, Egypt, a city on the Rosetta branch of the Nile, about 50 miles east of Alexandria, my family lived steps away from the local landmark, a mosque named for a 13th-century Sufi sheik.
You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you.
The sufis believe that they can experience something more complete.
Before I begin to write, I listen to music that inspires me. I listen to folk Punjabi music, sufi music.
There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life.
The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk.
I don't know what to make of the Muslim mystics, especially those who have come to be known as the Sufis. What do they experience in their mystic experiences? Could they have encountered the same God we do in our Christian mysticism?
