Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)

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You give but little when you give of your possessions.
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

Kahlil Gibran
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

Kahlil Gibran
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Kahlil Gibran
Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Kahlil Gibran
Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They came through you but not from you
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

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

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

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

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
You can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?

Kahlil Gibran
In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Kahlil Gibran
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have found the soul walking upon my path." For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

Kahlil Gibran
Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in twilight between the night of his pigmy-self and the day of his god-self,
And that the corner-stone of the temple is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation.

Kahlil Gibran
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

Kahlil Gibran
And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Kahlil Gibran
If [the teacher] is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.

Kahlil Gibran
In the depths of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

Kahlil Gibran
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret.

Kahlil Gibran
Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

Kahlil Gibran
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

Kahlil Gibran
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Kahlil Gibran
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

Kahlil Gibran
The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.

Kahlil Gibran
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Kahlil Gibran
You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

Kahlil Gibran
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself....
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night....
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.

Kahlil Gibran
Say not, I have found the truth, but rather, I have found a truth.

Kahlil Gibran