We rarely hear the inward music,

but we're all dancing to it nevertheless,

directed by the one who teaches us,

the pure joy of the sun,

our music master.

-- Rumi

(in The Essential Rumi,

translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne)

Who is the luckiest in this whole orchestra? The reed.

Its mouth touches your lips to learn music.

All reeds, sugarcane especially, think only

of this chance. They sway in the canebrakes,

free in the many ways they dance.

Without you the instruments would die.

One sits close beside you. Another takes a long kiss.

The tambourine begs, Touch my skin so I can be myself.

Let me feel you enter each limb bone by bone,

that what died last night can be whole today.

-- Rumi

(in The Essential Rumi,

translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne)

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don't open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-- Rumi

(in The Essential Rumi,

translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne)

Art presents itself as a way of life, not unlike religion, science, and socialism. It differs from these other modes of understanding only in that it is not a product of its time and appears, as it were, as the worldview of the ultimate goal.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

(in Letters on Life,

translated by Ulrich Baer)