ATTRIBUTED
The wound is the place where the light enters you.
Attributed
Widely credited, but not traced to a source.
This quote is widely credited to the author across popular collections, but we haven't traced it to a primary published source. The attribution is plausible, but unconfirmed — cite it with care.
Editorial Note
This line is universally credited to the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi, and the sentiment is authentically his — but the crisp one-sentence form circulating today is a modern condensation rather than something Rumi wrote word-for-word. Its genuine root is a passage in Book I of the Mathnawi, Rumi's masterwork, which in Coleman Barks's widely read 1995 rendering (developed from Reynold Nicholson's scholarly translation) speaks of keeping your eyes on the bandaged wound, "That's where the light enters you." We could find no verbatim occurrence of the compact aphorism in Rumi's letters (Maktubat), his sermons (the Seven Sermons), or any minor prose — the sources where a stray line might hide — and no rival author or earlier use surfaced anywhere. In short: the image and idea are truly Rumi's, but the polished phrasing is a translator's-turned-popular reshaping, which is why we mark it attributed rather than verified.
