Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet Quotes

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.

To belittle, you have to be little.

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

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

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

As the strings of a lute are apart though they quiver the same music.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

you are good when you strive to give 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.

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

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.

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?

In the summer heat the reapers say, “We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.

And one of the elders of the city, said, speak to us of good and evil.And he answered :You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good .

A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings.

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.

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

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

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

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

I came here to be for all and with all, and what I do today in my solitudewill be echoed tomorrow by the multitude.What I say now with one heartwill be said tomorrow by thousands of hearts...

The lust for comfort kills the passions of the soul.

The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.

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.

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.

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.

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

What is word knowledge but a shadow of wordless knowledge?