Kahlil Gibran - from The Prophet

Kahlil Gibran

On Buying and Selling


To you the earth yields her fruit, and you shall not want if you but know how to fill your hands.
It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you shall find abundance and be satisfied.
Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.


When in the market place you toilers of the sea and fields and vineyards meet the weavers and the potters and the gatherers of spices,
Invoke then the master spirit of the earth, to come into your midst and sanctify the scales and the reckoning that weighs value against value.


And suffer not the barren-handed to take part in your transactions, who would sell their words for your labour.
To such men you should say,
"Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net;
For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us."


And if there come the singers and the dancers and the flute players, buy of their gifts also.
For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and food for your soul.


And before you leave the market place, see that no one has gone his way with empty hands.
For the master spirit of the earth shall not sleep peacefully upon the wind till the needs of the least of you are satisfied.


On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
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.


from Crime and Punishment

I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot
rise beyond the highest which is in each of you,

So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower
than the lowest which is in you also.

And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with
the silent knowledge of the whole tree,

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.

And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the
whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also.