Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran January 6,1883 -- April 10 1931


   But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

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

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  One day you will ask me which is more important my life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

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Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection. Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood.

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 Come and tell me who and what are you. Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in a desert.

The New Frontier, written 36 years before US President JF Kennedy's famous inaugural speech.


 Khalil Gibran was born on January 6, 1883. In Bsharri, a mountainous area in Northern Lebanon.  Gibran had a half-brother six years older than him called Peter and two younger sisters, Mariana and Sultana, whom he was deeply attached to throughout his life, along with his mother. Gibran was a solitary and pensive child who relished the natural surroundings of Bsharri, cascading falls, the rugged cliffs and the neighboring green cedars, the beauty of which emerged as a dramatic and symbolic influence to his drawings and writings.
   
The family was poor so he did not receive any formal education or learning.The village priest  doctrined him with the essentials of religion and the Bible, alongside Syriac and Arabic languages. Recognizing Gibran's inquisitive and alert nature, the priest began teaching him the rudiments of alphabet and language, opening up to Gibran the world of history, science, and language. At the age of ten, Gibran fell off a cliff, wounding his left shoulder. To fix the shoulder, his family strapped it to a cross and wrapped it up for forty days, a symbolic incident reminiscent of Christ's wanderings in the wilderness and which remained etched in Gibran's memory.

I am alive like you, and now I stand beside you.

Close your eyes and look around, you will see me in front of you.

Gibran's epitaph