I prefer to be a dreamer among the humblest, with visions to be realized, than lord among those without dreams and desires.
Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the beauty of trees and the tragic irony of turning them into paper to express our feelings of emptiness.
In this quote, Khalil Gibran poetically illustrates the profound relationship between nature and humanity. He likens trees to poems created by the earth, which beautifully extend into the sky. However, he emphasizes a tragic truth: humans cut down these majestic beings to make paper, using it to write down their feelings of emptiness and lack of fulfillment. Thus, Gibran comments on the symbolic loss of beauty and the shallow expressions that often arise from it.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about environmental conservation to highlight the beauty of nature.
More from Khalil Gibran
All quotes βBe patient, for it is from doubt that knowledge is born.
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.
God made Truth with many doors to welcome every believer who knocks on them.
Happiness is a vine that takes root and grows within the heart, never outside it.
Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.
Similar quotes
Live in each season as it passes: breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit.
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I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.
To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.
This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.