The Prophet

by Kahlil Gibran

Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering?

love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

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

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

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

what is fear of need but need itself?

IT is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding;

And you receivers – and you are all receivers – assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives.

Why receiving gifts always feels like a debt

when you work with love you bind your self to yourself, and to one another, and to God.

charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,

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

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?

Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.

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

Exploitative Capitalism

You delight in laying down laws, Yet you delight more in breaking them.

for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.

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

For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

rest in reason and move in passion.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.

The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.

when you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence,

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips,

And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.

You are good when you are one with yourself.

You are good when you strive to give of yourself.

You are good when you are fully awake in your speech.

IN your longing for your giant self lies your goodness: and that longing is in all of you.

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

For what is prayer but the expansion of your self into the living ether?

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. Therefore, let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion.

For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking you shall not receive:

Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations?

you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

IN the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;

Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.

To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.

That which seems most feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined. Is it not your breath that has erected and hardened the structure of your bones?