Kahlil Gibran, النبي Quotes

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride?

Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

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.

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.

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights.

Beauty is a thing of might and dread.Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.

Suffer not yet our eyes to hunger for your face.

Accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

In your winter you deny your spring,

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

Life is but a sleep disturbed By dreaming

You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good, you are only loitering and sluggard.

Yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream.

Yesterday was a beautiful tune on the lips of life and today is a silent secret.

What is word knowledge but a shadow of wordless knowledge?

When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.

Dig anywhere in the earth and you will find a treasure, only you must dig with the faith of a peasant.

The breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.

Stand together yet not too near together:For the pillars of the temples stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each others shadow.

My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear - a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence

You may forget the one with whom you have laughed, but never the one with whom you have wept.

Verily the kindness that gazes upon itself in a mirror turns to stone, And a good deed that calls itself by tender names becomes the parent to a curse

Not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.

Ready am I to go, and my eagerness with sails full set awaits the wind.Only another breath will I breathe in this still air, only another loving look cast backward,

Self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Death changes nothing but the masks that cover our faces.

I cannot tarry longer.The sea that calls all things unto her calls me

you are good when you strive to give of yourself.

You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams

You may judge others only according to your knowledge of yourself.

And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man.

I too am my own forerunner, though I sit in the shadows of my trees and seem motionless.

Life is not only merriment, It is desire and determination.

There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair

Smile, my beloved, like the gold smiles from my father's coffers.

Long ago you were a dream in your mother's sleep, and then she awoke to give you birth.

Some of our children are our justifications and some are but our regrets.

Life kisses our faces every morning. Yet, between morning and evening, she laughs at our sorrows.

He who has not looked on Sorrow will never see Joy

Know, therefore, that from the greater silence I shall return..... Forget not that I shall come back to you....A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and anohter woman shall bear me.

If you can see only what light reveals and hear only what sound announces, then in truth you do not see nor do you hear.

Let there be spaces in your togetherness.And let the wind of the heavens dance between you.

But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean.

Generosity is not in giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is in giving me that which you need more than I do.

You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.”The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.

Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering?And shall it be said that my eve was in truth my dawn?