ATTRIBUTED
As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears.
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.
Source
A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings, translated by Coleman Barks (2006)
Editorial Note
The familiar English wording appears in Coleman Barks's A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings (2006). Barks works from earlier translations rather than the Persian, and his renderings are interpretive versions in his own poetic voice, so this sentence is best understood as Barks's rendering of a poem presented as Rumi's, not a verbatim line from Rumi himself. The sentiment — that the path reveals itself only once you begin walking — is consistent with Rumi's Sufi thought, and no competing author or documented earlier origin exists for this wording. It is often compared to Antonio Machado's "Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar" ("Traveler, there is no path; the path is made by walking"), from Proverbios y cantares XXIX (1912) — a verifiable poem with a similar theme, but an independent work, not the origin of this line. We classify the quote as attributed; verification would require matching it to a specific numbered passage in the Persian corpus (Masnavi or Divan-e Shams).
