Chris Levy > Chris's Quotes

“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.”
― Rumi

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
― Rumi

“What you seek is seeking you.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”
― Rumi

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
― Rumi

“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”
― Rumi

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”
― Rumi

“When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.
Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.”
― Rumi

“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
― Rumi

“My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“All his life the example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic -" Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal "- had seemed to him to be true only in relation to Caius the man, man in general, and it was quite justified, but he wasn't Caius and he wasn't man in general, and he had always been something quite, quite special apart from all other beings; he was Vanya, with Mama, with Papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with his toys and the coachman, with Nyanya, then with Katenka, with all the joys, sorrows, passions of childhood, boyhood, youth. Did Caius know the smell of the striped leather ball Vanya loved so much?: Did Caius kiss his mother's hand like that and did the silken folds of Caius's mother's dress rustle like that for him? Was Caius in love like that? Could Caius chair a session like that? And Caius is indeed mortal and it's right that he should die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my feelings and thoughts - for me it's quite different. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too horrible.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“They had supper and went away, and Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.

With this consciousness, and with physical pain besides the terror, he must go to bed, often to lie awake the greater part of the night. Next morning he had to get up again, dress, go to the law courts, speak, and write; or if he did not go out, spend at home those twenty-four hours a day each of which was a torture. And he had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“It occurred to him that he had not spent his life as he should have done. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych