| RUMI | 13th-century Persian Sufi poet and philosopher who wrote the Masnavi (4) |
| ATTAR | Sufi poet thought to have coined the adage found at the starts of 19-, 27-, 45- and 52-Across |
| MACH | Austrian physicist and philosopher who introduced the Mach number and who founded logical positivism |
| THOREAU | Henry David, US poet and philosopher who wrote the work Walden about simple living (7) |
| DANTE | Italian poet and philosopher who wrote The Divine Comedy (5) |
| LUCRETIUS | Roman poet and philosopher who wrote on Epicureanism (9) |
| OMAR | 11th century Persian mathematician and poet Khayyam |
| RAND | Last name of the Russian-born American writer and philosopher who gained fame with her novel The Fountainhead (1943) |
| IRISMURDOCH | Author and philosopher who wrote the Booker Prizewinning novel The Sea, The Sea (4,7) |
| FIFI | The Sufi figure skater had a French name (4) |
| EMERSON | Transcendentalist poet and philosopher who discusses nonconformity, individuality and solitude in his essay Self-Reliance (7) |
| TAGORE | Rabindranath ___, Indian poet and philosopher who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1913 |
| MURDOCH | Iris ---, author and philosopher who wrote the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea (7) |
| MACHIAVELLI | Niccolo _, Florentine statesman and philosopher who wrote the 16th-century treatise The Prince (11) |
| ABOU | ___ Ben Adhem, Sufi saint |
| FIFE | Small flute used by Sufi fellowship |
| ABBASS | 16th/17th-century Persian shah, who secured and strengthened the Safavid dynasty (5,1) |
| OMARKHAYYAM | "The Rubaiyat of ... ...", 1859 translation of 12th Century Persian poems by Edward Fitzgerald (4,7) |
| IBNGABIRL | Major Tel Aviv street named after the 11th century CE Jewish Andalusian poet and philosopher (3,6) |
| XENOPHANES | Greek poet and philosopher regarded as a founder of the Eleatic School (10) |
