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.

COVER THE JAR FOR KHERQEPUSH HAS ARRIVED چه جای صحبت نامحرم است مجلس انس[1]

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

• 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

• 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;[2] 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

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Hafez on Wikipedia
• Claud Field: A Dictionary of Oriental Quotations: Arabic And Persian, The Macmillan Company, 1911. [[3]]