The Prophet (Macmillan Collector's Library) by Kahlil Gibran (2016-07-14)

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.

He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant; And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

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

Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

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

And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.

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

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.

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

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And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. 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.

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?

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

It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.

And that the corner-stone of the temple is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation.

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

And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

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 sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.

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

For the truly good ask not the naked, “Where is your garment?” nor the houseless, “What has befallen your house?”

It is enough that you enter the temple invisible.

Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.

And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy. People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.

And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy. It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth, But rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted.

All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.

Your daily life is your temple and your religion.

That which seems most feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined.