"Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation"
About this Quote
Love only discovers its own extremity when it gets cut off from what it loves - a romantic idea, sure, but also a quietly ruthless one. Gibran isn’t praising separation so much as exposing love’s blind spot: while we’re inside it, love feels like atmosphere, not measurement. The “hour of separation” functions like a pressure test. Remove the familiar presence, and suddenly the attachment that felt ordinary reveals itself as structure - the thing holding up your daily life.
The line works because it flips how we usually imagine emotional knowledge. We tell ourselves we “know” our feelings in real time; Gibran argues we mostly infer them after the fact, through loss. That’s a subtle critique of human self-awareness: we’re poor narrators of our own hearts until the plot turns against us. The archaic “Ever has it been” lends the sentiment a scriptural inevitability, as if this isn’t a personal insight but a law of human wiring.
Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century as a Lebanese-American poet shaped by migration, war, and spiritual eclecticism, Gibran understood separation not as a rare tragedy but as a modern condition. Distance - geographic, cultural, relational - becomes the instrument that clarifies value. The subtext is almost preventative: don’t mistake comfort for comprehension, and don’t assume love’s intensity is proportional to its noise. Often it’s absence, not passion, that tells the truth.
The line works because it flips how we usually imagine emotional knowledge. We tell ourselves we “know” our feelings in real time; Gibran argues we mostly infer them after the fact, through loss. That’s a subtle critique of human self-awareness: we’re poor narrators of our own hearts until the plot turns against us. The archaic “Ever has it been” lends the sentiment a scriptural inevitability, as if this isn’t a personal insight but a law of human wiring.
Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century as a Lebanese-American poet shaped by migration, war, and spiritual eclecticism, Gibran understood separation not as a rare tragedy but as a modern condition. Distance - geographic, cultural, relational - becomes the instrument that clarifies value. The subtext is almost preventative: don’t mistake comfort for comprehension, and don’t assume love’s intensity is proportional to its noise. Often it’s absence, not passion, that tells the truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Heartbreak |
|---|---|
| Source | Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (1923), section "On Love" — passage commonly cited as "Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation." |
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