I think many people my age found Gibran’s words in college. I can remember a time everyone was reading and discussing his books. “Sorrowful persons find joy in lamentations and lovers encounter comfort and condolence in dreams, and the oppressed delight in receiving sympathy. I am writing to you now because I feel like a poet who fancies the beauty of objects whose impression he composes in verse while being ruled by a divine power…”    —-Excerpted by THE SECRETS OF THE HEART

The knowledge I want is the knowledge I can act on

My Countrymen

” What do you seek, My Countrymen?

Do you desire that I build for

You gorgeous palaces, decorated

With words of empty meaning, or

Temples roofed with dreams? Or

Do you command me to destroy what

The liars and tyrants have built?

Shall I uproot with my fingers

What the hypocrites and the wicked

Have implanted? Speak your insane Wish!

—-Khalil Gibran

” Will you accept a heart that loves,

But never yields? And burns, but

Never melts? Will you be at ease

With a soul that quivers before the

Tempest, but never surrenders to it?

Will you accept  one as a companion

Who makes not slaves, nor will become

One? Will you own me but not possess

Me? By taking my body and not my heart?

Then here is my hand—grasp it with

Your beautiful hand; and here is mine

Body—embrace it with your loving

Arms; and here are my lips—bestow

Upon them a deep and dizzying kiss.”

Gibran , yesterday is a memory

“My heart was weary within me and bade me farewell and repaired to the Abode of Happiness. And when it was come to that sanctuary which the spirit had sanctified, it stood in wonderment, for it saw not there things it had imagined.”   —-Khalil Gibran

Gibran was twenty- one, a struggling young artist, when he met and fell in love with Mary Haskell of Boston. He asked her to marry him. She believed that for his sake she must refuse. Loving him passionately, she devoted herself over the years to his happiness, soothing his turmoils, sharing  his joys and working with him on his manuscripts.

love from Gibran’s heart ends his pain

Some of his books include: Nymphs of the Valley, A Tear and a Smile, Sand and Foam, The earth gods, and The Prophet. This Man From Lebanon is a study of his work written by Barbara Young.

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