428 Interesting Quotes by Kahlil Gibran
Welcome to our collection of quotes by Kahlil Gibran. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Khalil Gibran
Gibran Khalil Gibran (Arabic: جبران خليل جبران, ALA-LC: Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān, pronounced [ʒʊˈbraːn xaˈliːl ʒʊˈbraːn], or Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān, pronounced [ʒɪˈbraːn xaˈliːl ʒɪˈbraːn]; January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran (pronounced kah-LEEL ji-BRAHN), was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.
Born in a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite family, the young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895. As his mother worked as a seamstress, he was enrolled at a school in Boston, where his creative abilities were quickly noticed by a teacher who presented him to photographer and publisher F. Holland Day. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fifteen to enroll at the Collège de la Sagesse in Beirut. Returning to Boston upon his youngest sister's death in 1902, he lost his older half-brother and his mother the following year, seemingly relying afterwards on his remaining sister's income from her work at a dressmaker's shop for some time.
In 1904, Gibran's drawings were displayed for the first time at Day's studio in Boston, and his first book in Arabic was published in 1905 in New York City. With the financial help of a newly met benefactress, Mary Haskell, Gibran studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910. While there, he came in contact with Syrian political thinkers promoting rebellion in the Ottoman Empire after the Young Turk Revolution; some of Gibran's writings, voicing the same ideas as well as anti-clericalism, would eventually be banned by the Ottoman authorities. In 1911, Gibran settled in New York, where his first book in English, The Madman, would be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1918, with writing of The Prophet or The Earth Gods also underway. His visual artwork was shown at Montross Gallery in 1914, and at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co. in 1917. He had also been corresponding remarkably with May Ziadeh since 1912. In 1920, Gibran re-founded the Pen League with fellow Mahjari poets. By the time of his death at the age of 48 from cirrhosis and incipient tuberculosis in one lung, he had achieved literary fame on "both sides of the Atlantic Ocean," and The Prophet had already been translated into German and French. His body was transferred to his birth village of Bsharri (in present-day Lebanon), to which he had bequeathed all future royalties on his books, and where a museum dedicated to his works now stands.
As worded by Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins, Gibran's life has been described as one "often caught between Nietzschean rebellion, Blakean pantheism and Sufi mysticism." Gibran discussed different themes in his writings, and explored diverse literary forms. Salma Khadra Jayyusi has called him "the single most important influence on Arabic poetry and literature during the first half of [the twentieth] century," and he is still celebrated as a literary hero in Lebanon. At the same time, "most of Gibran's paintings expressed his personal vision, incorporating spiritual and mythological symbolism," with art critic Alice Raphael recognizing in the painter a classicist, whose work owed "more to the findings of Da Vinci than it [did] to any modern insurgent." His "prodigious body of work" has been described as "an artistic legacy to people of all nations."
You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.
Truth is a deep kindness that teaches us to be content in our everyday life and share with the people the same happiness.
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
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.
Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and sharing of pleasure. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.
And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:
Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.
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.
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.
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.
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.
Your friend is your needs answered.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Your friend is your needs answered. He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving. And he is your board and your fireside. For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.
Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?
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.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth./nThe archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
What the soul knows is often unknown to the man who has a soul. We are infinitely more than we think.
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.
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.
Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy. It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth, But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
Love is a sacred mystery.
To those who love, it remains forever wordless;
But to those who do not love, it may be but a heartless jest.
Do not keep crying when your love has been gone. You only need Smile because he had been given you the opportunity to meet someone who is better.
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.
The mother is everything - she is our consolation in sorrow, our hope in misery, and our strength in weakness. She is the source of love, mercy, sympathy, and forgiveness. He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly
Spiritual awakening is the most essential thing in man's life, and it is the sole purpose of being. Is not civilization, in all its tragic forms, a supreme motive for spiritual awakening?
Love is a magic ray emitted from the burning core of the soul and illuminating the surrounding earth. It enables us to perceive life as a beautiful dream between one awakening and another.
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.
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.
You may chain my hands, you may shackle my feet; you may even throw me into a dark prison; but you shall not enslave my thinking, because it is free!
If I could take your troubles
I would toss them into the sea,
But all these things I'm finding
Are impossible for me.
I cannot build a mountain
Or catch a rainbow fair,
But let me be what I know best,
A friend that is always there.
What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?
Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.
The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.