Work is love made visible.

In The Prophet, Almustafa answers the people of Orphalese before his ship carries him home, and a ploughman asks him to speak of work. All work is empty “save when there is love”, he says, and to work with love is “to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth”. Then comes the line, with a stern corollary: if you can work only with distaste, better leave your work and “take alms of those who work with joy”, for bread baked with indifference “feeds but half man’s hunger”.

Gibran, born in a mountain village of Lebanon, emigrated to Boston as a boy and wrote The Prophet in English in New York. Published in 1923, it became, after a slow start, one of the most widely sold books of the century.

The line is the one most often lifted from the chapter, quoted in workshops and offices alike; its second half, about leaving work one cannot love, is more rarely remembered.

The Prophet, “On Work”, 1923

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work