Love and marriage
Stand together, but not too near together. Read at ten thousand weddings.
- How close is too close in a relationship?
- I'm losing myself in someone else.
- Is it possible to love without needing?
Spirituality & Mindfulness
Talk to The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
- 1923
- English
- Public domain
Read at weddings and funerals more than almost any other book, which tells you what it is for. Gibran wrote it in English, his second language, and that slight formality is part of why it sounds the way it does — nothing in it is casual.
The frame is simple. A man named Almustafa, about to sail home after twelve years in a foreign city, is asked by the people gathered on the shore to speak before he goes. They ask him about love, marriage, children, work, sorrow, freedom, death. He answers each in turn.
He does not give advice. He gives images — the archer and the bow, the oak and the cypress, the lute strings that quiver separately. Whether that reads as profound or as beautifully evasive tends to depend on what you brought to it.
Start here
What you can ask it
Children and letting go
Your children are not your children. The most quoted lines he wrote.
- How do I let my child make their own mistakes?
- My parents want a different life for me than I want.
- How do I love someone I can't protect?
Work and what it's for
Work is love made visible — a line that has been used both ways.
- I hate my job and I can't afford to leave.
- How do I find meaning in ordinary work?
- Is what I do who I am?
Joy, sorrow and grief
The deeper sorrow carves, the more joy you can contain.
- I'm grieving and I don't know how to carry it.
- Why does happiness make me anxious?
- Does pain actually teach you anything?
Talk to this book
Message the consciousness of The Prophet
Ask Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
- How close is too close in a relationship?
- How do I let my child make their own mistakes?
- I hate my job and I can't afford to leave.
What The Prophet actually is
The Prophet is a book of twenty-six prose poems published in 1923 by Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese-American writer and artist who emigrated to Boston as a child.
Each chapter is a response to a question from the crowd gathered to see the prophet Almustafa depart — on marriage, on children, on giving, on work, on joy and sorrow, on friendship, on death.
It has never been out of print, has sold tens of millions of copies, and was largely ignored by critics for decades. Its influence is more visible in what people read aloud at the most important moments of their lives than in any literary canon. Gibran drew on Christianity, Sufism and Romantic poetry without belonging to any of them.
In its words
Passages
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
Let there be spaces in your togetherness.
Work is love made visible.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
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Talk to this book
Message the consciousness of The Prophet
Ask Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
Begin the conversation