This audio is the chapter from the book "The Prophet" of legendary Khalil Gibran, called "On Freedom." An orator of Orphalese is asking the prophet to speak about the freedom, and the prophet gives deep answer.
On freedom and the narrator said speak to us of freedom and he answered at the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom even as slaves humble themselves before retiring and praise him though he slays them I in the groove of the temple and in the shadow of the Citadel I have seen the frizzed among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff and my heart bled within me for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and fulfillment you shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want but rather than these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound and how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour in truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains though it links glitter in the Sun and dazzle your eyes and what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free if it is an unusual and just law you would abolish that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead you cannot erase it by burning your low books no by washing the foreheads of your judges though you pour the sea upon them and if it is despot you would dethrone see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed for how can a tyrant ruling the free and the proud but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride and if it's a care you would cast off that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you and if it's a fear you would dispel the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace the desired and the dreaded repugnant and the cherished the pursued and that which you would escape these things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that clean and when the shadow fades and is no more the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light and thus your freedom when it loses its fetters become itself the fetter of a greater freedom
