Kahlil Gibran on Life

"If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were."

"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."

"For in truth it is life that gives unto life-while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness."

"Man struggles to find life outside himself, unaware that the life he is seeking is within him."

"Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches; Yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth."

"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them."

"My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues."

"If you sing of beauty though alone in the heart of the desert you will have an audience."

"When Life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind."

"Life without Liberty is like a body without spirit. Liberty without thought is like a disturbed spirit … Life, liberty, and thought — three persons in one substance, eternal, never-ending, and unceasing."

"Your thought sees power in armies, cannons, battleships, submarines, aeroplanes, and poison gas. But mine asserts that power lies in reason, resolution, and truth. No matter how long the tyrant endures, he will be the loser at the end. Your thought differentiates between pragmatist and idealist, between the part and the whole, between the mystic and materialist. Mine realizes that life is one and its weights, measures and tables do not coincide with your weights, measures and tables. He whom you suppose an idealist may be a practical man."

"Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the goodness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life. This is the truth which I have learned from the teachings of the Nazarene."