Kahlil Gibran Quotes

277 Sourced Quotes

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

Kahlil Gibran
My yearning is my cup, my burning thirst is my drink, and my solitude is my intoxication; I do not and shall not quench my thirst. But in this burning that is never extinguished is a joy that never wanes.

Kahlil Gibran
You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps. Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping. For those who limp go not backwards. But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness.

Kahlil Gibran
In truth we gaze but do not see, and hearken but do not hear; we eat and drink but do not taste. And there lies the difference between Jesus of Nazareth and ourselves.
His senses were all continually made new, and the world to Him was always a new world.

Kahlil Gibran
Life without Love is like a tree without blossom and fruit.

Kahlil Gibran
The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it,

Kahlil Gibran
Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you.

Kahlil Gibran
God has placed in each soul an apostle to lead us upon the illumined path. Yet many seek life from without, unaware that it is within them.

Kahlil Gibran
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.

Kahlil Gibran
When you kill a beast, say to him in your heart: By the same power that slays you, I too am slain, and I too shall be consumed. For the law that delivers you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand. Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.

Kahlil Gibran
Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

Kahlil Gibran
Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.

Kahlil Gibran
To love life through labor is to be intimate with life's inmost secret.

Kahlil Gibran
O love, whose lordly hand
Has bridled my desires,
And raised my hunger and my thirst
To dignity and pride,
Let not the strong in me and the constant
Eat the bread or drink the wine
That tempt my weaker self.
Let me rather starve,
And let my heart parch with thirst,
And let me die and perish,
Ere I stretch my hand
To a cup you did not fill,
Or a bowl you did not bless.

Kahlil Gibran
Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.

Kahlil Gibran
My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me to touch what has never taken corporeal form or crystallized. It made me understand that touching something is half the task of comprehending it, and that what we grasp therein is part of what we desire from it.

Kahlil Gibran
You were born together, and together you shall be for evermore....
But let there be spaces in your togetherness.
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Kahlil Gibran
And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? But if in you thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.

Kahlil Gibran
He was gentle, like a man mindful of his own strength.
In my dreams I beheld the kings of the earth standing in awe in His presence.

Kahlil Gibran
Do you not remember me, Nicodemus, who believed in naught but the laws and decrees and was in continual subjection to observances?
And behold me now, a man who walks with life and laughs with the sun from the first moment it smiles upon the mountain until it yields itself to bed behind the hills.

Kahlil Gibran
And if there come the singers, and the dancers and the flute players - buy of their gifts also. For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and fod for your soul.

Kahlil Gibran
Your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

Kahlil Gibran
A fox looked at his shadow at sunrise and said, I will have a camel for lunch today. And all morning he went about looking for camels. But at noon he saw his shadow again-and he said, A mouse will do.

Kahlil Gibran
You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable. You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons. Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.

Kahlil Gibran
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.

Kahlil Gibran
Many are the fools who say that Jesus stood in His own path and opposed Himself; that He knew not His own mind, and in the absence of that knowledge confounded Himself.
Many indeed are the owls who know no song unlike their own hooting.
You and I know the jugglers of words who would honor only a greater juggler, men who carry their heads in baskets to the market-place and sell them to the first bidder.
We know the pygmies who abuse the sky-man. And we know what the weed would say of the oak tree and the cedar.
I pity them that they cannot rise to the heights.

Kahlil Gibran
You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind....

Kahlil Gibran
To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but what he aspires to.

Kahlil Gibran
Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite.

Kahlil Gibran
When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Kahlil Gibran