Life & Wisdom Quote by Kahlil Gibran

Zeal, for Gibran, is not a polite personality trait; it is a geological event. Calling it a volcano rejects the modern fantasy that conviction can be neatly managed, filed under “motivation,” and toggled on when convenient. A volcano is heat under pressure, a force that rearranges the landscape. That’s the intent: to praise the kind of inner intensity that doesn’t merely choose a direction but makes other directions feel impossible.

The second image does the real work. “The grass of indecisiveness” is small, domestic, almost suburban: grass grows quietly, evenly, without drama. It suggests hesitation as a slow settling into comfort, a softening of will that takes root when nothing disrupts it. Gibran’s line draws a harsh, almost puritanical boundary: where zeal exists at its peak, ambiguity can’t even sprout. Not because zeal “wins an argument,” but because it alters the conditions of life. On that summit, the ground is too hot, too unstable, too exposed for dithering to survive.

Context matters. Gibran wrote as a Lebanese-American poet steeped in Romanticism and spiritual discourse, publishing The Prophet in 1923, when mass politics, nationalism, and reform movements were all selling their own versions of righteous intensity. The quote flirts with that era’s appetite for absolute belief, while smuggling in a warning: volcanoes are awe-inspiring, but they also destroy. The subtext is that certainty is both purification and peril - a moral aesthetic that can energize a life or scorch it clean of nuance.