"If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work"
About this Quote
Work, for Gibran, is never just a paycheck; its a moral and spiritual posture. The line draws a hard boundary: labor done in distaste is not merely unpleasant, its corrosive. You can hear the implicit accusation behind the gentle cadence - if you show up resentful, you are quietly sabotaging both the thing you make and the people who must live with it. The intent is less self-help than ethical instruction: leave, rather than contaminate.
The subtext is also an argument about dignity. In an industrializing world that increasingly treated workers as interchangeable parts, Gibran insists on the inner life of the laborer as the real site of value. Love here isnt sugary enthusiasm; its a form of attention, a willingness to be present, to take responsibility for the outcome. Distaste, by contrast, isnt honest critique; its disengagement wearing the mask of realism. The line pressures you to admit what you already know: cynicism is easy, and it spreads.
Context matters. Gibran, a Lebanese-American poet writing in early 20th-century America, was steeped in Romantic and mystical traditions that saw the everyday as a place to practice the sacred. In The Prophet (where this idea resonates), work becomes a way of joining yourself to others - a social bond, not a private grind. Read today, the quote lands as both liberating and inconvenient: it validates quitting a misaligned job, but it also refuses the modern comfort of ironic detachment. If you stay, he implies, you owe the work your whole self.
The subtext is also an argument about dignity. In an industrializing world that increasingly treated workers as interchangeable parts, Gibran insists on the inner life of the laborer as the real site of value. Love here isnt sugary enthusiasm; its a form of attention, a willingness to be present, to take responsibility for the outcome. Distaste, by contrast, isnt honest critique; its disengagement wearing the mask of realism. The line pressures you to admit what you already know: cynicism is easy, and it spreads.
Context matters. Gibran, a Lebanese-American poet writing in early 20th-century America, was steeped in Romantic and mystical traditions that saw the everyday as a place to practice the sacred. In The Prophet (where this idea resonates), work becomes a way of joining yourself to others - a social bond, not a private grind. Read today, the quote lands as both liberating and inconvenient: it validates quitting a misaligned job, but it also refuses the modern comfort of ironic detachment. If you stay, he implies, you owe the work your whole self.
Quote Details
| Topic | Quitting Job |
|---|---|
| Source | The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran), 1923 — section "On Work" (contains the line beginning "If you cannot work with love..."). |
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