Do
About the Author
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Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) was a
as
Timeless Wisdom to Feed the Spirit
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For the past eighty years, the beautiful
words of the Lebanese-American poet
Lebanese-American artist, poet, and writer
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Kahlil Gibran have graced everything from
t
and Nourish the Soul
of the New York Pen League. A native of
z
greeting cards and wedding invitations to
what is now Lebanon, he immigrated with
inspirational wall hangings and corporate
his family to the United States, where he
motivational literature. By one account,
studied art and began his literary career,
Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Life
Gibran is the third bestselling poet of all
writing in both English and Arabic. In
time, after Shakespeare and Lao Tzu.
Th e Valu e of Ti m e
the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a
In Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Life,
literary and political rebel. He is chiefl y
we discover the essential wisdom of what
They deem me mad because
known in the English-speaking world for
it means to be alive. For Gibran, life is that
I will not sell my days for gold.
his 1923 book The Prophet, an early exam-
energy that saturates all we see and feel—
And I deem them mad because
ple of inspirational fi ction that includes a
they think my days have a price.
as well as what we can only imagine. Here
series of philosophical essays written in
are over one hundred fables, aphorisms,
poetic English prose.
They spread before us their riches
parables, stories, and poems in that vision-
of gold and silver, of ivory and ebony,
ary voice of comfort, love, and tolerance.
About the Compiler
and we spread before them
Sections include Listening to Nature’s Life,
Neil Douglas-Klotz (Saadi Shakur Chishti),
our hearts and our spirits.
Beauty and the Song of Life, Life’s Human
PhD, is a world-renowned scholar in reli-
gious studies, spirituality, and psychology.
And yet they deem
Kahlil Gibran’s Journey, and Life as a Journey.
The words in this charming little book
themselves the hosts
Living in Edinburgh, Scotland, he directs
are infused with wisdom and joy. It is
and us the guests.
the Edinburgh Institute for Advanced
indeed an ideal book for every season of
Learning and for many years was the
one’s life.
cochair of the Mysticism Group of the
L i t t l e B o o k o f L i f e
American Academy of Religion. He is also
the cofounder of the International Network
www.redwheelweiser.com
for the Dances of Universal Peace.
I S B N 978-1-57174-830-0
U.S. $15.95
5 1 5 9 5
Neil Douglas- Klotz
9 7 8 1 5 7 1 7 4 8 3 0 0
Kahlil Gibran’s
L IT T L E BOOK OF L IFE
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Kahlil Gibran’s
L IT T L E BOOK OF L IFE
Neil Douglas-Klotz
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Copyright © 2018
by Neil Douglas-Klotz
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro-
duced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief
passages.
Cover design by Jim Warner
Cover illustration: Bridgeman images © Rebecca Campbell,
The Trumpeter
Interior by Deborah Dutton
Typeset in ITC Garamond Std and MrsEaves
Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Charlottesville, VA 22906
Distributed by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
www.redwheelweiser.com
Sign up for our newsletter and special offers by going to
www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter.
ISBN: 978-1-57174-830-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gibran, Kahlil, 1883-1931 author. | Douglas-Klotz, Neil
compiler author of introduction.
Title: Kahlil Gibran's little book of life / Kahlil Gibran ; selected
and introduced by Neil Douglas-Klotz.
Other titles: Little book of life
Description: Charlottesville, VA : Hampton Roads Publishing,
2018. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039961 | ISBN 9781571748300 (paperback)
Subjects: | BISAC: RELIGION / Christian Life / Inspirational. |
POETRY /
Inspirational & Religious. | RELIGION / Islam / Sufi.
Classification: LCC PS3513.I25 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.52--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039961
Printed in Canada
MAR
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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FOR ALL THE IMMIGRANTS WHO CONTRIBUTE TO
NEW CULTURES AND CIVILIZATIONS
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Contents
Introduction xiii
1. Listening to Nature’s Life 1
The Law of Nature
2
Said a Blade of Grass
4
Three Dogs
5
Shadows
7
Song of the Rain
8
A Hyena and a Crocodile
11
Two Oysters
12
Trees Are Poems
13
The Red Earth
14
The Full Moon
15
The Supreme Ant
16
The Pomegranate
18
Solitude
20
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Living Water
21
Other Seas
22
The River
23
Contentment and Thrift
25
The Lotus-Heart
26
The Shadow
29
The Serpent and the Lark
30
Frogs: On the Nature of Disturbance
33
Song of the Flower
36
Spring in Lebanon
38
2. Beauty and the Song of Life 41
Life’s Purpose
r /> 42
Singing
43
Secrets of the Beauty of Life
45
The Poet
47
Art and Life
51
Pleasure Is a Freedom Song
53
Singing
54
Before the Throne of Beauty
55
The Flute
59
Beauty
61
Soul of the Dancer
64
An Hour Devoted to Beauty and Love
66
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3. Life’s Human Journey 69
Your Daily Life Is Your Temple
70
Burying Dead Selves
72
Giving Up a Kingdom
73
Possessions
77
Treasure
78
The Value of Time
79
With Senses Continually Made New
80
Work Is Love
82
Builders of Bridges
84
Renown
86
Life Is a Procession
87
Song of Humanity
88
Singing in the Silence
91
Modesty
92
Between
93
Ignorance
94
When You Meet a Friend
95
Strangers to Life
96
Life Is a Resolution
97
Longing
98
To American Immigrants from the
Middle East (1926)
99
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4. Seasons of Life 103
Changing with the Seasons
104
No Miracles Beyond the Seasons
105
Youth and Knowledge
108
Seasons
109
Autumn and Spring
110
Time
111
All Your Hours Are Wings
112
Be Dark
113
Day and Night
114
Shell-Life
115
Tides of Breath
116
Shoreless Without a Self
117
Finding Fault
118
Every Year I Had Waited for Spring . . .
119
5. Paradoxical Life 123
Life Comes Walking
124
Talk
125
A Tale of Two Tales
126
Confession
127
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Yesterday and Today
128
Gifts of the Earth
133
Giving and Gaining
134
High and Low
135
Seeking
136
Freedom
137
Limits
140
Owl Eyes
141
Voices
142
Ocean and Foam
143
Blessing Darkness
144
Agreement
146
Jesus and Pan
147
6. The Life of the Soul 151
Resurrection of Life
152
A Fragment
153
The Greater Sea
154
Truth Is Like the Stars
157
Have Mercy on Me, My Soul
158
Trust the Dreams
162
The Greater Self
163
Rising
165
Children of Space
166
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Leave Me, My Blamer
167
The Forerunner
171
Walk Facing the Sun
173
Soul’s Dewdrop
174
Roots Between
175
Self Is a Sea
176
The Longing of the Giant Self
178
Angels and Devils
179
Blessed Mountain
180
Song of the Soul
181
Sources of the Selections 184
Selection Notes 185
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Introduction
For the past eighty years, the beautiful words of
the Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran have
graced everything from greeting cards and wed-
ding invitations to inspirational wall hangings
and corporate motivational literature. By one
account, Gibran is the third best-selling poet of
all time, after Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu. Through
short excerpts, largely extracted from his famous
book The Prophet, most of us know him as a
visionary voice of comfort, love, and tolerance.
As wonderful as this is, there is much more
to Kahlil Gibran.
These new “little book” collections take a
fresh look at Gibran’s words and wisdom taking
into account the major influences on his life: his
Middle Eastern culture, nature mysticism, and
spirituality. One could easily argue that what the
average reader of his time found exotic in Gibran
is the way he clearly expressed a region that
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most regarded as a conundrum. A hundred years
later, understanding this conundrum has moved
beyond being an exotic pastime to becoming a
matter of survival.
The book before you collects Gibran’s words
on “life.” Future books in this series will collect
Gibran’s writings on love and relationships, on
secrets of the spiritual path, and on wisdom for
everyday life.
To English speakers, the word life remains
abstract. Do we mean the life-span of a human
being, the course of daily life, or the philosophi-
cal premise of existence? Who or what has life?
To a Middle Easterner, the word life has a very
specific meaning. Whether in biblical Hebrew,
the Aramaic of Jesus, or the literary Arabic in
which Gibran wrote many of his early works, life
means life energy and vitality. What is important
is the way someone or something expresses
this life, not the way he, she, or it appears. Life
(hayy in Arabic) is related to the common word
for breath in the Semitic languages—a breath of
life that is found in all of nature and throughout
the universe.
K A H L I L G I B R A N ’ S L I T T L E B O O K O F L I F E
xiv
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The “unnameable Name” of God in the
ancient Hebrew tradition is related to this word
as is one of the “99 Beautiful Names” of God in
the Islamic tradition. Whether earthly or heavenly
life, temporal or eternal life, inner or outer life—
to a Middle
Eastern poet and mystic like Gibran it
is all one life energy saturating everything we can
see and feel, as well as what we can only imagine.
Because Gibran deliberately connects cat-
egories that most of us see as opposites, some
critics have accused him of exploiting the simple
literary device of paradox to artificially confuse
and bemuse his readers. But seeing light and
dark, inner and outer, good and evil as comple-
ments, not opposites, lies at the heart of Middle
Eastern culture and philosophy. If there is only
one life behind and within everything, then con-
nections lie around every corner, so to speak.
According to one of his biographers, Suheil
Bushrui, Gibran was heavily influenced by the
mysticism of the 12th-century Andalusian Sufi
Moinuddin Ibn Arabi. In Ibn Arabi’s idea of the
“unity of Being,” the divine reality suffuses all
of existence, yet is greater than anything we can
I N T R O D U C T I O N
xv
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experience or discover. Even more, Ibn Arabi
implies that what we call life is a kind of
experiment-in-process by which the Greater
Reality (related to what Gibran calls the “Greater
Soul”) progressively learns more about itself
through the life journeys of every plant, animal,
human being, star, and galaxy, as well as an
unnameable number of unseen beings.
Another major influence: Gibran was raised
as a Maronite Christian, an Eastern church allied
to the Roman Catholic, but which until the 18th
century spoke and used in liturgy the Syriac lan-
guage, related to Jesus’ native Aramaic. According
to Dr. Walid Phares, the Secretary General of the
World Maronite Union, “the historic identity
of the Maronite people is Aramaic, Syriac, and
Eastern. . . . Maronites, particularly the national
community that lived in Mount Lebanon and its
peripheries for thirteen centuries, have main-
tained their historical identity despite attempts
by regional powers, including Arab and Ottoman
empires, to impose an alien identity.”
This upbringing had two major effects
on Gibran.
K A H L I L G I B R A N ’ S L I T T L E B O O K O F L I F E
xvi
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First, the Aramaic-speaking churches histori-
cally viewed Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth, as
a human being, a small-s “son” of God, who
uniquely fulfills his destiny and expresses the
divine life in a way open to us all. In this sense,
we can all become “children” of God, that is,
of “Sacred Unity” (the literal translation of the
Aramaic word for God, Alaha). Gibran’s book
Jesus The Son of Man takes the same viewpoint.
In a very modern way, it tells the prophet’s story