Omar Khayyam Love Quotes

It’s too bad if a heart lacks fire, and is deprived of the light of a heart ablaze. The day on which you are without passionate love is the most wasted day of your life.

How sad, a heart that does not know how to love, that does not know what it is to be drunk with love. If you are not in love, how can you enjoy the blinding light of the sun, the soft light of the moon?

A book of verses underneath the bough A flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness And wilderness is paradise now.

So I be written in the Book of Love. I do not care about that Book Above. Erase my name, or write it as you will. So I be written in the Book of Love.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness - And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits -- and then Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

How much more of the mosque, of prayer and fasting? Better go drunk and begging round the taverns. Khayyam, drink wine, for soon this clay of yours Will make a cup, bowl, one day a jar. When once you hear the roses are in bloom, Then is the time, my love, to pour the wine; Houris and palaces and Heaven and Hell- These are but fairy-tales, forget them all.

I hide my distress, just like the blessed birds hide themselves when they are preparing to die. Wine! Wine, roses, music and your indifference to my sadness, my loved-one!

I sometimes think the Pussy-Willows grey Are Angel Kittens who have lost their way, And every Bulrush on the river bank A Cat-Tail from some lovely Cat astray.

May your love for your beloved be as great as the love of the bottle for the glass. Look, how one gives and one receives, lip against lip, the precious blood of the grapes!

Be quiet, pain and sorrow! Let me find a remedy. I have to live, as once dead there is no memory. And I want to see my love and be with her. And I want to remember our being together.

We shall perish along the path of Love. Fate will trample us. Yeah, tempting young woman, get up and give me your lips before I return to dust.

The scent of wine rising from my grave will be so strong that it will intoxicate passers-by. There will be such an atmosphere of serenity that couples in love will find it impossible to tear themselves away.

To bind one free man with love is better than to release a thousand slaves.

The arch of heaven looks like an upside-down cup, under which the wise wander in vain. May your love for your beloved be as great as the love of the bottle for the glass. Look, how one gives and one receives, lip against lip, the precious blood of the grapes.

I despise the zeal of the devout, but I have never said that the One is two. I am not one of those for whom faith is simply fear of judgement. How do I pray? I study a rose, I count the stars, I marvel at the beauty of the creation and how perfectly ordered it is, at man, the most beautiful work of the Creator, his brain thirsting for knowledge, his heart for love, and his senses, all his senses alert or gratified.

Eventually, the men’s talk of politics turned to poetry. The recitations could begin with a quatrain from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat: I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry, Half a loaf for a bite to eat, Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot, Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm. To which a voice might answer with a poem by Rumi: My arrow of love has arrived at the target I am in the house of mercy and my heart is a place of prayer. These gatherings went on for hours, with one guest after another reciting poems of the Persian masters—Rumi, Khayyam, Sa’adi, snd Hafez. That my father, the Colonel, who could make us cower with a single sidelong glance, produced the most skillful recitations both bewildered and fascinated me. His voice had a deep timbre perfectly suited to reciting verse, and the frequent cries of “Lovely!” and “Exquisite!” roused him to ever more passionate declamation. I listened from behind the window, enraptured by the music of a language that can sometimes sound like susurrations of a lover and sometimes like the reed’s plaintive song. The words hooked into me and wouldn’t let me go. Rivers, oceans, and deserts, the nightingale and the rose—the perennial symbols of Persian poetry first grew familiar to me through these late-night scenes in the garden, and even though I was still a young girl, only just a child, the verses called me away to different lands.

Happiness consists in having something to love, something to do, and something to hope for.