Inspirational quotes by Rumi and Ben Okri

“Awe is the salve

that will heal our eyes.”

                                    Rumi (The Essential Rumi, p65)

"Stay out in the open like a date palm

lifting its arms. Don’t bore mouse holes

in the ground, arguing inside some

doctrinal labyrinth.

That intellectual warp and woof keeps you wrapped

in blindness.”

                                    Rumi (The Essential Rumi, p66)

“We must look at the world with new eyes. We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven’t begun to live yet. The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated. We can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.”

                                    Ben Okri (The Famished Road, p498) (Vintage Books, UK. 1991)

“...seeking the truth of the inner hearts of men and women parallels the initial fall in Genesis: there are truths better left unknown. For to seek 'truth' behind life and death...is to seek, like Adam in Paradise, knowledge which can do man no good."

Regina Barreca (Introduction to SHE, by E.Rider Haggard)

In fact there is, for mankind, no inherent need to know, only a contagion which flourishes within imperfect ignorance; knowing is a complex one suffers from obliviously; the knowledge of knowers is symptomatic, like the phlegm of the flu. One does not actually need to 'know'- knowledge is simply a neolithic convenience, a stone tool, an obsolescence which merely allows us to live comfortably, too comfortably; the complacencies of our limited understandings become the silk linings covering the cold walls of the caves we yet dwell meagerly within.

                                   Jack Haas

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These inspirational quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.