The Prophet - Notes

A friend lent me her cherished copy of The Prophet yesterday, so I spent the night reading it.  I don't know how I have lived this long and have never even heard of this book, but I am so thankful to have met her and have her introduce me to it.  This is a must buy for me and something I will go back to time and time again.  The book is separated into chapters based around a subject and my notes are just a few lines from each one that stuck out at me.  You can get this book for as low as $0.75 cents right now, which is a steal.

Anyway, here are some selected quotes.

Enjoy!

TF
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The Prophet – Kahill Gibran

Love

When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heard of God.”

Marriage

You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.

Giving

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

Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.

Work

For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.

Work is love made visible.

Joy/Sorrow

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

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

Houses

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

That which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

Clothes

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

And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.

Buying/Selling

For the master spirit of the earth shall not sleep peacefully upon the wind till the needs of the lease of you are satisfied.

Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man.

Crime

You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked.  For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.

The corner stone of the temple is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation.

Laws

You can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?

Freedom

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.

Reason/Passion

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

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and he sails of your seafaring soul.

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

Pain

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

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

Teaching

No man can reveal to you aught by that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

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

For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.

Friendship

Your friend is your needs answered.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

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

Talking

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

There are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.

Time

Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is but today’s dream.

Is not time as love is, undivided and paceless?

Good/Evil

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst.

You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good.  You are only loitering and sluggard.

Prayer

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.

God listens not to your words save when He Himself utters them through your lips.

Pleasure

Pleasure is a freedom-song, but it is not freedom.

Regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement.

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

Your body is the harp of your soul.

Beauty

Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in the mirror.  But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

Religion

He who wears his morality but as his best garment is better naked.

He who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his songbird in a cage.

If you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.

Death

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

Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate of eternity.

What is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered.

Uncategorized

We wanders, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us.

To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of ocean by the frailty of its foam.

Your thoughts and my words are waves from a sealed memory that keeps records of our yesterdays.

Surely there is no greater gift to a man than that which turns all his aims into parching lips and all life into a fountain.

A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.

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