Life & Wisdom Quote by Kahlil Gibran

Gibran’s line flatters the dreamer while quietly rebuking the modern tyrannies of the measurable. “Trust in dreams” isn’t just a Hallmark nudge toward whimsy; it’s a command to treat the irrational as a source of authority. The verb matters. You don’t merely enjoy dreams or interpret them, you trust them - the way you’d trust a witness, a compass, a sacred text. That’s the subtext: the inner life is not a private hobby but a legitimate epistemology.

Then comes the bait-and-switch: dreams aren’t valuable because they’re pleasant, but because they’re portals. “Hidden the gate to eternity” wraps mysticism in the language of architecture: a gate suggests entry, threshold, passage, permission. Eternity isn’t presented as a doctrinal heaven; it’s a dimension you approach through imagination, longing, and symbolic experience. By calling the gate “hidden,” Gibran smuggles in his central romantic premise: the deepest truths aren’t public-facing; they’re veiled, felt, and earned.

Context sharpens the intent. Writing in the early 20th century, an era intoxicated with industry, positivism, and the new prestige of psychology, Gibran offers a counter-modern spirituality: not anti-reason exactly, but suspicious of a world that mistakes calculation for wisdom. As a Lebanese-American poet shaped by Maronite Christianity, Sufi-inflected mysticism, and immigrant displacement, he’s drawn to thresholds - between cultures, languages, selves. Dreams become a metaphor for that borderland, where exile turns into insight and the finite body gets a brief appointment with the infinite.