Khalil Gibran Quotes

Your body is the harp of your soul and it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.

He who has not looked on Sorrow will never see Joy. [for without sorrow how would you know what joy is? Contrast provides peceptive clarity]

You may give them your love, but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

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

The thirst of soul is sweeter than the wine of material things, and the fear of spirit is dearer than the security of the body.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

Because the soul is like a flower that folds its petals when dark comes, and breathes not its fragrance into the phantoms of the night.

I had a second birth when my soul and my body loved one another and were married.

What is fear of need but need itself?

You, the strong, have I loved, though the marks of your iron hoofs are yet upon my flesh.

I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.

...unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.

He who does not seek advice is a fool. His folly blinds him to Truth and makes him evil, stubborn, and a danger to his fellow man.

Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?

And what word is knowledge but a shadow of wordless knowledge?

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

Let there be spaces in your togetherness...just as strings of a lute dance alone though they quiver with the same music.

That deed which in our guilt we today call weakness, will appear tomorrow as an essential link in the complete chain of Man.

Give me an ear and I will give you a Voice.

It is slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body

We are the sons of Sorrow; we are the poets and the prophets and the musicians.

History does not repeat itself except in the minds of those who do not know history.

You are a flower crushed beneath the feet of the animal that is concealed in a human being. Take comfort, in that you are the flower crushed and not the foot that has crushed it.

A hermit is one who renounces the world of fragments that he may enjoy the world wholly and without interruption.

God has made many doors opening into truth which He opens to all who knock upon them with hands of faith.

Science and religion are in full accord, but science and faith are in complete discord.

The creator gives no heed to the critic unless he becomes a barren inventor.

For love is sufficient unto love.

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labor a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.

Pity it is we drowse too soon Pity it is we fall asleep Ere our song encompass the height Ere our hand inherit the deep

A minute moving among the patterns of beauty and the dreams of love is greater and more precious than an age filled with splendor granted by the weak to the strong.

You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

Often times I have hated in self-defense; if I were stronger I would not have used such a weapon.

Everyone has a potential for greatness.

The silence of the envious is too noisy.

What the soul knows is often unknown to the man who has a soul. We are infinitely more than we think.

Limited love asks for possession of the beloved, but the unlimited asks only for itself.

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

We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words.

Thinking is always the stumbling stone to poetry.

A truth is to be known always, to be uttered sometimes.

When we oppose the hidden conscience, it does us hurt. When we betray it, it judges us.

Like the seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.

And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.

The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it.

To be closer to god, be closer to people.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

Love is the veil between lover and lover.

Inspiration will always sing; inspiration will never explain.