This one is real. The Persian is Masnavi-i Ma’navi, Book III, verses 3901–3906, dictated in Konya between about 1258 and Rumi’s death in 1273. The English everybody shares is not a loose modern ‘version’ — it is Reynold A. Nicholson’s verse rendering, printed on page 168 of The Mystics of Islam (1914), which we read in the scanned first edition. One small thing has drifted: Nicholson printed “I died as mineral… and I was man”; the internet added the article and the capital.
“I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man” Rumi, Masnavi-i Ma'navi, Book III, lines 3901–3906 (dictated c. 1258–1273), translated in Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914), page 168. Nicholson's printed text reads "I died as mineral… and I was man"; the widely shared "a mineral… Man" is later drift. Via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?”
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Provenance
Where the lines actually come from
Work
Masnavi-i Ma’navi, Book III, verses 3901–3906
Composed
Dictated in Konya, c. 1258 until Rumi’s death in 1273
Translation quoted
Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914), p. 168
Checked against
The scanned 1914 first edition and the Project Gutenberg transcription
“I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar With angels blest; but even from angelhood I must pass on: all except God doth perish. When I have sacrificed my angel soul, I shall become what no mind e’er conceived. Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence Proclaims in organ tones, ‘To Him we shall return.’”
The Mystics of Islam, 1914 — page 168, the last page of the book
This is how the passage is actually printed, and the eleven lines are the whole of it — the quote in circulation stops at line three or four. Nicholson sets it up by noting that Jalaluddin, having described the evolution of man in the material world and anticipating his further growth in the spiritual universe, then utters a heartfelt prayer — for self-annihilation in the ocean of the Godhead.
We started where the specialists file it. Wikiquote puts the passage in its Masnavi section — the sourced side of the page, not ‘Attributed’ — and credits it to R. A. Nicholson, 1914 Wikiquote’s Rumi page ↗. That gave us a book to open rather than a name to argue about.
So we opened it. The eleven lines are the closing passage of Chapter VI, ‘The Unitive State’, immediately before the bibliography, in The Mystics of Islam — G. Bell & Sons, London, 1914, in Mead’s Quest Series the full text ↗. The scanned first edition puts them under the running head ‘168 THE MYSTICS OF ISLAM’, which fixes the page the scan ↗.
Then we went back to the Persian, because a good translation is not the same as a real quotation. The verses are Mathnawi III: 3901–3906, beginning az jumâdî mord-am-o nâmê shod-amDar al-Masnavi ↗, and the same identification is made in the Dar-al-Masnavi discussion list thread on exactly this often-quoted English the thread ↗. Rumi wrote it; Nicholson made it sing.
✓Public domain
Both halves are clear. Rumi’s Persian dates from the 1260s–70s and has been out of copyright for centuries; the English quoted here is Reynold A. Nicholson’s, first published by G. Bell & Sons in 1914 — well before the 1931 United States threshold — and Project Gutenberg carries the book as public domain in the USA ↗. This applies to this translation only: later twentieth-century renderings of the same verses are separate works with their own rights.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What gets it wrong
The author credit is sound — unusually, for Rumi. What goes wrong here is one level down: who made the English, what the English actually says, and what the poem is about.
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TranslatorA. J. Arberry Mis-credited
These eleven lines circulate widely under Arberry’s name — the Maulana Rumi Online post that attacks the rendering line by line heads it ‘Translated by A.J. Arberry’ before criticising the choice of ‘mineral’, ‘angels blest’, ‘sacrificed’ and ‘organ tones’ the Arberry credit ↗. Every one of those words is Nicholson’s, printed in The Mystics of Islam in 1914 the 1914 text ↗.
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WordingThe circulating text Drifted
The version on quote sites — and on Wikiquote, which credits Nicholson 1914 while printing it — reads ‘I died as a mineral’, capitalises ‘Man’ twice, and hyphenates ‘angel-soul’ Wikiquote’s text ↗. The 1914 book prints ‘I died as mineral’, ‘I was man’, ‘die as man’ and ‘angel soul’ the scan ↗. Small, but it means almost nobody is quoting the printed line.
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Meaning‘Rumi anticipated evolution’ Misread
The mineral–plant–animal–man sequence is routinely offered as a medieval Persian preview of Darwin, or as proof Rumi taught reincarnation. The commentary attached to Mathnawi III: 3901 says it is neither — not transmigration, not reincarnation, not early biological evolution, but an account of the soul’s ascent and return Dar al-Masnavi ↗.
✓Rumi wrote it, in the Masnavi, Book III, verses 3901–3906. Reynold A. Nicholson turned it into the English you know, on page 168 of The Mystics of Islam, 1914 ↗ — and that translation is now public domain.
Context
Why it matters
Nicholson set this passage at the very end of his book, as the last word on what Sufis actually mean by union with God. He introduces it by saying that Jalaluddin, having described the ascent of man through the material world, then prays — not for eternal personal life, but for self-annihilation. That is the point of the poem, and it is the point most quotations lose: the ladder is climbed in order to be let go of.
The lines are constantly recruited as evidence that a thirteenth-century Persian anticipated Darwin. That reading is old and stubborn, and it is rejected by the people who work on the Persian: the note accompanying Mathnawi III: 3901 at Dar al-Masnavi ↗ says flatly that this is not transmigration, not reincarnation and not an early view of biological evolution, but a metaphysical account of the soul’s return.
The ladder is climbed in order to be let go of.
How Nicholson himself later re-translated it
Nicholson came back to these verses years later for his complete edition of the Masnavi — the eight-volume Gibb Memorial set published between 1924 and 1940, the first full English translation of the poem ↗. His literal rendering of III: 3901 opens ‘I died to the inorganic state and became endowed with growth’ — accurate, bracketed, and entirely unquotable the literal version ↗.
That contrast is why the 1914 wording is the one that travelled. The famous English line is a young scholar’s poetry, made for a general-audience book in a popular series; the scholarly version of the same six verses has never been quoted by anyone outside a footnote.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1207–1273 · Persian poet, Islamic jurist and Sufi mystic
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was born on 30 September 1207 in Wakhsh, in what is now Tajikistan, and died on 17 December 1273 in Konya, in present-day Turkey, where he had spent most of his adult life as a jurist and teacher. His great work, the Masnavi-i Ma’navi — six books and roughly 25,000 verses of stories, arguments and Qur’anic commentary in rhyming couplets — was dictated from about 1258 until his death, and the sixth book was left unfinished. He is one of the most quoted poets on the English-speaking internet and one of the most misquoted, which makes the passages that genuinely survive in his own text worth marking clearly.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this
Jalal al-Din Rumi, Masnavi-i Ma’navi, bk. 3, lines 3901–3906, translated in Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914), 168.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-died-as-a-mineral-and-became-a-plant-i-died-as-plant-and/