Life & Wisdom Quote by Yunus Emre

Thought, in Yunus Emre's framing, is not the sovereign of the self but its hired help: quick on its feet, useful, and fundamentally subordinate. Calling thought an "errand boy" punctures the modern fantasy that thinking harder will redeem us. An errand boy doesn’t set the agenda; he runs tasks for whoever’s in charge. In the Sufi universe Yunus writes from, that "whoever" is usually the ego when it panics, and the heart when it remembers. The line quietly demotes intellect from master to instrument.

Then he pivots: fear isn’t a single alarm bell, it’s a mine. The metaphor matters. Mines are dark, subterranean, and perversely productive: you dig and dig and keep pulling out more material. Fear operates the same way, generating an endless yield of worries that feel like discoveries ("What if this happens? What if that?") but are really self-excavations. The more you invest in it, the more inventory it provides. Yunus captures anxiety as a kind of industry.

The couplet’s subtext is spiritual triage. If thought is only running errands, check who’s giving orders. If fear is a mine, stop mistaking the extraction for insight. Yunus wrote in a medieval Anatolia marked by political churn and uncertainty; his poetry repeatedly tries to redirect attention from mental noise toward inner steadiness. The intent isn’t anti-intellectualism so much as a warning: when fear is in charge, thought becomes its delivery system.