Khalil Gibran Quotes

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day.

I don't think anybody thinks they're bad, just in life, in general.

So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.

An animal takes freely anything that it wishes: it commits no sin and is not held responsible for its action because it knows no better. But as soon as the idea of 'mine' and 'thine' has been imprinted upon our consciousness, then also the responsibility comes.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

We are all human, and we do bad things sometimes.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.

It is very questionable, in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances.

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

We are more pained when one of our friends is guilty of something shameful than when we do it ourselves.

To me a saint is a severely edited sinner. That's what I think.

I couldn't help what I'd done before I learned it was wrong. I could only do better in the future.

Repentance for past crimes is just and easy; but sin-no-more's a task too hard for mortals

Inability to tell good from evil is the greatest worry of man's life.

Even the righteous man is just a sinner living in between sins.

The moral man is as guilty as the rest. His morality cannot save him.

Conscience, man's moral medicine chest.

It is my firm faith that man is by nature going higher.

You will not become a saint through other people's sins.

Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.