Hafez Quotes

Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī , known by his pen name Hafez and as "Hafiz", was a Persian poet who "lauded the joys of love and wine but also targeted religious hypocrisy". He was a Sufi Muslim. His collected works are regarded as a pinnacle of Persian literature and are often found in the homes of people in the Persian-speaking world, who learn his poems by heart and still use them as proverbs and sayings. His life and poems have become the subjects of much analysis, commentary and interpretation, influencing post-14th century Persian writing more than any other author.Hafez is best known for his poems that can be described as "antinomian" and with the medieval use of the term "theosophical"; the term "theosophy" in the 13th and 14th centuries was used to indicate mystical work by "authors only inspired by the holy books" . Hafez primarily wrote in the literary genre of lyric poetry, or ghazals, that is the ideal style for expressing the ecstasy of divine inspiration in the mystical form of love poems.

Themes of his ghazals include the beloved, faith, and exposing hypocrisy. In his ghazals he deals with love, wine and taverns, all presenting ecstasy and freedom from restraint, whether in actual worldly release or in the voice of the lover speaking of divine love.

His influence on Persian speakers appears in divination by his poems and in the frequent use of his poems in Persian traditional music, visual art, and Persian calligraphy. His tomb is visited often. Adaptations, imitations and translations of his poems exist in all major languages. Wikipedia  

✵ 1326 – 1389
Hafez photo
Hafez: 4   quotes 9   likes

Famous Hafez Quotes

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

Source: 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

“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 https://books.google.com/books?id=_cdWZkYE_ZQC (1999), p. 34. This is not a translation or interpretation of any poem by Hafez; http://www.payvand.com/news/09/apr/1266.html it is an original poem by Ladinsky inspired by the spirit of Hafez in a dream.
Misattributed

“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

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