The Prophet
About This Book
The Prophet is one of the most beloved and widely read spiritual texts of the twentieth century — a short masterwork of prose-poetry in which the prophet Almustafa, preparing to return home after twelve years in the city of Orphalese, is asked by the people to share his understanding on twenty-six subjects essential to human life: love, marriage, children, work, joy and sorrow, freedom, reason and passion, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death. Gibran's responses are written in a poetic language of extraordinary compression and luminosity, packing lifetimes of wisdom into a few sentences that continue to unfold in meaning with each rereading.
Gibran wrote the book in English in the early 1920s, drawing on his background in Lebanese Maronite Christianity, Sufi poetry (particularly Rumi and al-Hallaj), Nietzsche, Blake, and the Romantic philosophical tradition. But the result transcends all these sources into something that feels like it arrived from a place deeper than any single tradition — a voice that speaks to the universally human regardless of cultural or religious context. The Prophet has been translated into more languages than any book except the Bible, and its capacity to provide comfort, clarity, and the experience of recognition to readers across a century and a half of rapidly changing world circumstances testifies to the timelessness of what it is actually saying.
What You'll Learn
• Encounter Gibran's vision of love as a force that both binds and liberates — the paradox of the cedar tree and the corn sheaf, standing together yet not too close together, each rooted in their own depth
• Understand his teaching on children: that they come through parents but do not belong to them, that they are 'the living arrows' fired by the bow that is the parent — a vision that revolutionises the usual understanding of the parent-child relationship
• Grasp his understanding of work as love made visible: why work done without love is hollow regardless of its worldly success, and why work done in the spirit of full engagement with one's deepest nature is always a form of prayer
• Learn his teaching on joy and sorrow as inseparable: that the capacity for joy is precisely proportional to the depth of one's capacity for sorrow, and that those who try to avoid suffering also diminish their capacity for delight
• Appreciate his vision of death not as the end of life but as the continuation of the journey — the unveiling of a presence that was always there, like a river returning to the sea from which it was never truly separated
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