If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.

This line is from Khalil Gibran’s prose-poem sequence The Prophet, in the chapter “On Work.” First published in 1923 in the United States, The Prophet presents the sage Almustafa offering farewell counsel to the people of Orphalese on central human concerns—love, marriage, children, giving, and labor. In “On Work,” Gibran frames work not merely as economic necessity but as a spiritual and communal act: what one makes and does should be an expression of inner devotion and a contribution to others. The admonition about leaving work done “with distaste” fits the book’s broader ethic of sincerity and wholeheartedness.

Gibran argues that labor has moral and spiritual weight: it is not only a means of survival but a way of participating in life and serving the community. The quote warns that work performed in resentment or aversion harms both the worker and those who receive the work’s fruits, because it lacks the care that makes labor humane. Read literally, it encourages choosing vocations aligned with one’s values; read more broadly, it urges bringing love—attention, craftsmanship, and goodwill—to whatever task one must do. The severity (“better that you should leave”) dramatizes the cost of alienated labor and elevates integrity over mere productivity.