"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them"
About this Quote
Gibran slips a quiet grenade into a single line: your happiness and heartbreak aren’t random weather systems, they’re commitments you’ve already made. The phrasing is deceptively calm, almost domestic, but the claim is radical. “Choose” shifts emotion out of the realm of fate and into the realm of authorship. It’s not that we pick events; we pick the lenses, loyalties, and narratives that will later determine which events count as joy and which land as sorrow.
The subtext is both liberating and accusatory. If you “chose” your sorrows, then suffering isn’t only something done to you; it’s also something you rehearsed through attachment, expectation, pride, or fear. That stings. Gibran softens the blow with symmetry: joys and sorrows get equal billing, as if to say you can’t outsource pain without also dulling pleasure. He’s arguing for emotional responsibility without flattening life into self-help optimism.
Context matters: Gibran wrote as a diasporic mystic-poet bridging Arabic and English literary worlds, steeped in spiritual traditions that treat inner life as destiny’s co-author. Read against early 20th-century modern upheaval, the line becomes a form of control in an uncontrollable era. It offers a way to reclaim agency when history, migration, and loss are busy reminding you how little you command.
The intent isn’t to deny tragedy; it’s to interrogate the preconditions of feeling. Long before the moment arrives, we’ve already trained ourselves what to worship, what to dread, and who we can’t bear to lose.
The subtext is both liberating and accusatory. If you “chose” your sorrows, then suffering isn’t only something done to you; it’s also something you rehearsed through attachment, expectation, pride, or fear. That stings. Gibran softens the blow with symmetry: joys and sorrows get equal billing, as if to say you can’t outsource pain without also dulling pleasure. He’s arguing for emotional responsibility without flattening life into self-help optimism.
Context matters: Gibran wrote as a diasporic mystic-poet bridging Arabic and English literary worlds, steeped in spiritual traditions that treat inner life as destiny’s co-author. Read against early 20th-century modern upheaval, the line becomes a form of control in an uncontrollable era. It offers a way to reclaim agency when history, migration, and loss are busy reminding you how little you command.
The intent isn’t to deny tragedy; it’s to interrogate the preconditions of feeling. Long before the moment arrives, we’ve already trained ourselves what to worship, what to dread, and who we can’t bear to lose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Kahlil
Add to List
