Saadi

Saadi Shiraz, Persian poet and prose writer (1210 – 1292) widely recognized as one of the greatest masters of thePersian poetry. Little about Saadi’s life is known with absolute certainty. Even the earliest references to him in external sources differ in important details, and although Saadi’s own writings, especially the “Bustan” and “Golestan”, contain many purportedly autobiographical reminiscences, a good number of these are historically implausible and are probably fictionalized or cast in the first-person for rhetorical effect. He is broadly known as one of the greatest poets of the classical literary tradition, obtaining him the title of "The Master of Speech". A contemporary Persian writer calls him: “The poet of love and life.”

“If you are a man of love, think less of yourself,
Otherwise take the easy way, absorbed by self.

Don’t fear love, though it consumes you utterly:
Even though it destroys you, it gives life beyond death.

The plant does not grow at once from the seed:
First its sense of the world must be transformed.

What allows you to perceive divine truth,
Is precisely what frees you from yourself.

So long as you are self-absorbed, you have no door to your deepest self.
He only knows this, who has left himself.

Spiritual music isn’t made by the musician alone:
With love’s fire in your heart, it comes when a hoof strikes stone.

For one in a rapturous state, even the fly
Can make him beat his head in ecstasy.

Drunk with delight, he hears not the lute’s string, low nor high:
He will weep nonetheless for the song of a lark in the sky.

There is always music from the divine musician:
It is your ear which does not always listen.”