Kahlil Gibran

Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and
beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.
– Kahlil Gibran

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.
– Kahlil Gibran

It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love
someone. But it takes a lifetime to forget someone.
– Kahlil Gibran

To be able to look back upon ones life in satisfaction, is to live twice.
– Kahlil Gibran

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance,
and affection to be art.
– Kahlil Gibran

I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant, and kindness from the
unkind. I should not be ungrateful to these teachers.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

Enthusiasm is a volcano on whose top never grows the grass of hesitation.
– Kahlil Gibran

Your reason and your passion are your rudder and sails of your seafaring soul, if either your
sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in
mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame
that burns to its own destruction.
– Kahlil Gibran

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
– Kahlil Gibran

I prefer to be a dreamer among the humblest, with visions to be realized, than lord among
those without dreams and desires.
– Kahlil Gibran

Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of
strength and resolution.
– Kahlil Gibran

Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that the laws of
humanity and the phenomena of nature do not alter its course.
– Kahlil Gibran

And God said, “Love your enemy,” and I obeyed Him and loved myself.
– Kahlil Gibran

Those who give you a serpent when you ask for a fish, may have nothing but serpents to
give. It is then generosity on their part.
– Kahlil Gibran

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache
with sorrow.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but
at what he aspires to.
– Kahlil Gibran

Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.
– Kahlil Gibran

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
– Kahlil Gibran

In every winter’s heart there is a quivering spring, and behind the veil of each night there is a
smiling dawn.
– Kahlil Gibran

Desire is half of life, indifference is half of death.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to
the rose.
– Kahlil Gibran

Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
– Kahlil Gibran

Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can
not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all
you are beyond that pain.
– Kahlil Gibran

If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t,
they never were.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.
– Kahlil Gibran

The mind weighs and measures but it is the spirit that reaches the heart of life and embraces
the secret; and the seed of the spirit is deathless.
– Kahlil Gibran

The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reaches us. So it is with great men
who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personalities.
– Kahlil Gibran

Your life is an island separated from all other islands and continents. Regardless of how many
boats you send to other shores or how many ships arrive upon your shores, you yourself are
an island separated by its own pains, secluded in its happiness.
– Kahlil Gibran

When life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her
mind.
– Kahlil Gibran

All you have shall some day be given; therefore give now, that the season of giving may be
yours and not your inheritors.
– Kahlil Gibran

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.
– 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

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.” The trees in your orchard say not so,
nor the flocks in your pastures. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.
Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you.
– Kahlil Gibran

He who has not looked on sorrow will never see joy.
– Kahlil Gibran

Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.
– Kahlil Gibran

To belittle, you have to be little.
– Kahlil Gibran

Wisdom stands at the turn in the road and calls upon us publicly, but we consider it false and
despise its adherents.
– 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.
– Kahlil Gibran

Modern civilization has made woman a little wiser, but it has increased her suffering because
of man’s covetousness. The woman of yesterday was a happy wife, but the woman of today
is a miserable mistress. In the past she walked blindly in the light, but now she walks
open-eyed in the dark. She was beautiful in her ignorance, virtuous in her simplicity, and
strong in her weakness. Today she has become ugly in her ingenuity, superficial and heartless
in her knowledge. Will the day ever come when beauty and knowledge, ingenuity and virtue,
and weakness of body and strength of spirit will be united in a woman?
– Kahlil Gibran

Truth is a deep kindness that teaches us to be content in our everyday life and share with
the people the same happiness.
– Kahlil Gibran

There is a space between man’s imagination and man’s attainment that may only be
traversed by his longing.
– Kahlil Gibran

I am a tree, grown in the shade, and today I stretched my branches to tremble for a while in
the daylight. I came here to tell you good-bye, my beloved, and it is my hope that our
farewell will be great and awful like our love. Let our farewell be like fire that bends the gold
and makes it more resplendent.
– Kahlil Gibran

Life is the mistress to be wooed.
– Kahlil Gibran

Love is trembling happiness.
– Kahlil Gibran

It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding.
– Kahlil Gibran

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
– Kahlil Gibran

You may forget with whom you laughed, but you will never forget with whom you wept.
– Kahlil Gibran

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because
they think my days have a price.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

Let your best be for your friend.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

In truth you owe naught to any man. You owe all to all men.
– Kahlil Gibran

Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.
– Kahlil Gibran

Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.
– Kahlil Gibran

Faith is an oasis in the heart which can never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
– Kahlil Gibran

When you love you should not think you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you
worthy, directs your course.
– Kahlil Gibran

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring
to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what
happens.
– Kahlil Gibran

By losing your goal, you have lost your way.
– Kahlil Gibran

The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.
– Kahlil Gibran

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
– Kahlil Gibran

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, we fell them down and turn them into paper,
that we may record our emptiness.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

Trust in dreams, for in them is the hidden gate to eternity.
– Kahlil Gibran

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.
– Kahlil Gibran

Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your
child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.
– Kahlil Gibran

All that spirits desire, spirits attain.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.
– Kahlil Gibran

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

Am I a harp that the hand of the mighty may touch me, or a flute that his breath may pass
through me? A seeker of silences am I, and what treasure have I found in silences that I may
dispense with confidence?
– Kahlil Gibran

We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells with windows and some without.
– Kahlil Gibran

Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness.
– Kahlil Gibran

If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always
remember.
– Kahlil Gibran

I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the
safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
– Kahlil Gibran

I am ignorant of absolute truth. But I am humble before my ignorance and therein lies my
honor and my reward.
– Kahlil Gibran

Am I less man because I believe in a greater man?
– Kahlil Gibran

My soul gave me good counsel, teaching me that the lamp which I carry does not belong to
me, and the song that I sing was not generated from within me.
– Kahlil Gibran

He who listens to truth is not less than he who utters truth.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

One’s own religion is after all a matter between oneself and one’s Maker and no one else’s.
– Kahlil Gibran

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to
the trees.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

He who seeks ecstasy in love should not complain of suffering.
– Kahlil Gibran

An eye for an eye, and the whole world would be blind.
– Kahlil Gibran

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.
– Kahlil Gibran

Your friend is your needs answered.
– Kahlil Gibran

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

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the
mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley
than to those who inhabit the mountain?
– Kahlil Gibran