The Prophet

by Kahlil Gibran

And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep.

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,

But let there be spaces in your togetherness.

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. 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.

And there are those who have little and give it all. These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.

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

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

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

And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.

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.

Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.

You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;

You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief, But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.

And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?

And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you. And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared. Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.

For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unclaimed.

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

And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand. And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.

But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, And let to-day embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.

Man’s needs change, but not his love, nor his desire that his love should satisfy his needs.

You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields.

Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you. It was but yesterday we met in a dream. You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky. But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn. The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part. If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song. And if our hands should meet in another dream we shall build another tower in the sky.