Kahlil Gibran Quotes: 65

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

  The Prophet

• If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were.

• Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,That we may record our emptiness.

• Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

• Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

• One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

• When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

• No human relation gives one possession in another—every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone.

• For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

• Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”But I say unto you, they are inseparable.Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

  The Prophet

• I AM IGNORANT of absolute truth. But I am humble before my ignorance and therein lies my honor and my reward.

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

  The Prophet

• Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding... And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy

• We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

• The Reality of The Other Person Lies Not In What He Reveals To You, But What He Cannot Reveal To You.Therefore, If You Would Understand Him, Listen Not To What He Says, But Rather To What He Does Not Say.

• Love one another, but make not a bond of love:Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

  The Prophet

• It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.

• Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

  The Prophet

• I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

  The Prophet

• When you part from your friend, you grieve not;For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, asthe mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

  The Prophet

• If you reveal your secrets to the wind,you should not blame the wind forrevealing them to the trees.

  The Wanderer

• I slept and I dreamed that life is all joy. I woke and I saw that life is all service. I served and I saw that service is joy.

• No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.If he 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.

  The Prophet

• You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link.This is but half the truth.You are also as strong as your strongest link.To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the oceanby the frailty of its foam.To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.

  The Prophet

• Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names.It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.

  The Forerunner: His Parables and Poems

• We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.

  The Prophet

• Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

  Mirrors of the Soul

• One's own religion is after all a matter between oneself and one's Maker and no one else's.

• They say: 'If a man knew himself,he would know all mankind.'I say: 'If a man loved mankind,he would know something of himself.

  Love Letters in the Sand: The Love Poems of Khalil Gibran

• When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.

  Sand and Foam

• Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.

  Sand and Foam

• Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself... 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.

• Your daily life is your temple and your religion.

• Work is love made visible. And if you can't 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 the people who work with joy

• The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

• Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

• Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer's hand.

• Darkness may hide the treesand the flowers from the eyesbut it cannot hidelove from the soul.

  Love Letters in the Sand: The Love Poems of Khalil Gibran

• And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

  The Prophet

• love one another, but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

  Prophet Hb

• Do not fear the thorns in your path, for they draw only corrupt blood.

• In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans; in one aspect of You are found all the aspects of existence.

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

  The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul

• Desire is half of life; indifference is half of death.

  Sand and Foam

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

  The Prophet

• Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

• You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.

  The Prophet

• I am the lover's gift; I am the wedding wreath;I am the memory of a moment of happiness;I am the last gift of the living to the dead;I am a part of joy and a part of sorrow.

• Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.

• He who is more mindful of one, loses the love and the faith of both.

  The Prophet

• I am forever walking upon these shores,Betwixt the sand and the foam,The high tide will erase my food prints,And the wind will blow away the foam,But the sea and the shore will remain forever.

  Sand and Foam

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

  The Prophet

• ولمّا فتحت قلبي لكي ارى السعادة, وجدت مرآتها وسريرها وملابسها, لكنّي لم اجدها.

• Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

  Sand and Foam

• Behind the veil of each night, there is a smiling dawn.

• Seven times have I despised my soul: The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks.

• For Reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and Passion, unattended,is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

  The Prophet

• Your daily life is your temple and your religion. When you enter into it take with you your all.

• He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.

  The Prophet

• إذا أشارت إليكم المحبة فاتبعوها, وإن كانت مسالكها صعبة متحدرة.وإذا ضمتكم جناحيها فاطيعوها, وإن جرحكم السيف المستور بين ريشها. واذا خاطبتكم المحبة فصدقُوها, وإن عَطل صوتها أحلامكم وبدَدها كما تجعل الريح الشمالية البستان قاعا صفصفا.لأنه كما أن المحبة تكللكم فهي أيضا تصلبكم,وكما تعمل على نموكم هكذا تعلمكم وتستأصل الفاسد منكم.

  The Prophet

• And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.

• Der Lehrer [...] gibt nicht von seiner Weisheit, sondern eher von seinem Glauben und seiner Liebe.

• Niemand kann euch etwas eröffnen, das nicht schon im Dämmern eures Wissens schlummert.

• Wenn [der Lehrer] wirklich weise ist, fordert er euch nicht auf, ins Haus seiner Weisheit einzutreten, sondern führt euch an die Schwelle eures eigenen Geistes.

• Die Einsicht eines Menschen verleiht ihre Flügel keinem anderen.