Happiness Quote by Kahlil Gibran

Gibran turns “wisdom” from a trophy into a temperament. The line is built like a moral tripwire: the moment insight hardens into performance, it stops being insight at all. “Too proud to weep” targets the vanity that often rides alongside intellect - the pose of being above ordinary hurt. In Gibran’s hands, tears aren’t weakness; they’re evidence of porousness, the willingness to be moved by other people and by life’s unavoidable losses. A mind that can’t be softened by grief is a mind that’s starting to calcify.

“Too grave to laugh” is the companion warning, aimed at the sanctimony of seriousness. Gibran is suspicious of the wise person who treats levity as beneath them, as if joy were intellectual betrayal. Laughter here isn’t distraction; it’s perspective - a refusal to let the self become the center of the universe. The wise are not those who never break, but those who can bend without snapping.

The final clause, “too selfish to seek other than itself,” exposes the real villain: self-enclosed wisdom, knowledge pursued as self-regard. Written by a Lebanese-American poet shaped by exile, spirituality, and the early 20th century’s disillusionments, the sentiment reads as both pastoral and corrective. Gibran’s intent is to re-ethicize intelligence: wisdom proves itself in empathy, humility, and relational curiosity, not in domination or detachment. The subtext is blunt: if your “wisdom” can’t cry, can’t laugh, can’t look outward, it’s just ego with better vocabulary.