Hafez

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.



Quotes

 * 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
That never has been fathomed yet by myriad thoughts profound.
 * The dimple that thy chin contains has beauty in its round,
 * 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

"Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate!"
 * 'Tis writ on Paradise's gate,
 * As quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Persian Poetry" (1858); also in Hoyt's The Cyclopædia of Practical Quotations (1882)

Misattributed

 * 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; it is an original poem by Ladinsky inspired by the spirit of Hafez in a dream.

Quotes about Hafez

 * 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