Hafez
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī (known by his pen name Hafez or Hāfiz) (1325/26–1389/90) was a Persian mystic poet.
 |
This article on an author is a stub. You can help Wikiquote by expanding it. |
Quotes[edit]
- Boy, let yon liquid ruby flow,
And bid thy pensive heart be glad,
Whate’er the frowning zealots say:
Tell them, their Eden cannot show
A stream so clear as Rocnabad,
A bow’r so sweet as Mosellay.- Sir William Jones, "A Persian Song of Hafiz"
- A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771)
- Poems, consisting chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (1772)
- It is a crime to seek to raise but self,
Before all other men to praise but self,
The pupil of the eye a lesson gives,
Be all submitted to thy gaze but self.- Quoted in A Dictionary of Oriental Quotations: Arabic And Persian (1911), p. 6
Odes[edit]
- The dimple that thy chin contains has beauty in its round,
That never has been fathomed yet by myriad thoughts profound.- Odes, CXLIII, in Hafiz of Shiraz: Selections from his Poems, translated from the Persian, by Herman Bicknell (1875), p. 197; quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 59
- Sweet are the garden, the rose, and wine, but they would not be sweet without the company of my darling.
- In A Century of Ghazels, or. a Hundred Odes, Selected and Translated from the Diwan of Hafiz (1875), p. 48; quoted with a slight change in Love: A Book of Quotations (2012), ed. Ann Braybrooks, p. 71
- What necessity for a sword to slay the lover, when a glance can deprive him of half his life!
- In A Century of Ghazels, or. a Hundred Odes, Selected and Translated from the Diwan of Hafiz (1875), p. 77; quoted with a slight change in Love: A Book of Quotations (2012), ed. Ann Braybrooks, p. 71
- 'Tis writ on Paradise's gate,
"Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate!"- As quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Persian Poetry" (1858); also in Hoyt's The Cyclopædia of Practical Quotations (1882)
Misattributed[edit]
Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,"You owe me."
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.- From Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz (1999), p. 34. This is not a translation or interpretation of any poem by Hafez;[1] it is an original poem by Ladinsky inspired by the spirit of Hafez in a dream.
Quotes about Hafez[edit]
- And what though all the world should sink!
Hafis! with thee, alone with thee
Will I contend! joy, misery,
The portion of us twain shall be;
Like thee to love, like thee to drink,—
This be my pride,—this, life to me!- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West–östlicher Divan, "Book of Hafis", 'The Unlimited' (1817), trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring
