Life & Wisdom Quote by Kahlil Gibran

A world that doesn’t just ignore you, but actively hurries you along while sneering: Gibran captures modern alienation in a single, breathless shove. The line is built like a trap. First, the motion: “hastening me” suggests an external force, time as a conveyor belt, society as a crowd pressing at your back. You’re not choosing the pace; you’re being moved. Then the epistemic void: “toward I know not what.” The terror isn’t death alone, but destinationlessness - a life sped up without an agreed-upon meaning. It’s anxiety as logistics.

The final clause turns the world from mechanism into judge. “Viewing me with contempt” is an almost paranoid intimacy: not merely that the world is indifferent, but that it’s morally appraising you and finding you wanting. That contempt can be read socially (class, respectability, the immigrant’s sense of being surveilled) and spiritually (the fallen human, aware of the gap between inner longing and outer performance). Gibran’s genius is how he fuses both without naming either; the ambiguity makes the shame feel atmospheric, everywhere.

Context matters. Writing across Lebanon and the U.S. in the early 20th century, Gibran lived inside dislocation: old faiths stressed by modernity, new economies reorganizing daily life, identities remade under the pressure of migration. The quote’s intent isn’t to settle the question but to dramatize the moment before consolation: when you realize the world’s speed is not the same as your soul’s direction.