The Prophet summary

Parting reveals what long nearness kept hidden. Love knows its own depth only in the hour of separation, and whoever stays out of fear of loss freezes and is bound in a mould. Gibran opens with Almustafa seeing from the hill the ship that will carry him home after twelve years in Orphalese. Joy and grief come together: the city where he suffered and sought has become his own skin, and he cannot leave it without a wound. Still, the sea that calls all things unto her calls him, and a voice must leave the lips that gave it wings. As the people run from their fields and winepresses, he asks what he has to give. He answers that he will raise his lantern empty and dark, and the guardian of the night will fill and light it. The elders, the priests and the seeress Almitra beg him to stay and then to speak. He agrees to speak only of what is even now moving within their souls.

Love is not a comfort to be held but a sovereign power that refines whoever yields to it. Gibran teaches that the same love which crowns also crucifies, and that it caresses the highest branches only to shake the roots loose from their clinging to the earth. In the image of the harvest, love gathers, threshes, sifts, grinds and kneads the soul until it becomes sacred bread for God’s feast, and all of this serves one end: that the heart may know its own secrets and become a fragment of Life’s heart. Whoever seeks only love’s peace and pleasure must leave the threshing-floor for a seasonless world of half laughter and half tears. Love neither possesses nor is possessed, it is sufficient unto itself, and it directs the course of the worthy rather than being directed by them. Gibran closes by naming the only desires fit for a lover: to melt like a singing brook, to know the pain of too much tenderness, and to fill the hours from dawn to sleep with gratitude, meditation and prayer for the beloved.

Marriage is a togetherness that outlasts death and rests even in the silent memory of God, yet it lives only where space is kept within it. Gibran asks the wedded to let the winds of the heavens dance between them and to let love be a moving sea between the shores of their souls, never a bond. They are to fill each other's cup but not drink from one cup, and share bread but not eat from one loaf. Each remains alone in the way the strings of a lute are alone while they quiver with the same music. Hearts are given, but not into each other's keeping, for only the hand of Life can contain them. The chapter closes on the pillars of the temple, which stand apart to bear one roof, and on the oak and the cypress, which do not grow in each other's shadow.

Children are not possessions of their parents. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself, and they pass through the parent without coming from the parent. Gibran sets out what a parent may give and what lies beyond giving. Love may be given but not thoughts. The body may be housed but not the soul, for the soul already dwells in a tomorrow the parent cannot enter, not even in dreams. Life moves forward and never returns to yesterday, so the elder may strive to be like the young but must not shape them into a copy of himself. The teaching closes on the image of the Archer. Parents are the bow, children the living arrows, and the Archer bends the bow toward a mark on the path of the infinite. The bending is to be borne with gladness, because the Archer loves the stable bow as truly as the flying arrow.

True giving is the giving of oneself. Possessions are only things kept and guarded for fear of tomorrow, and the fear of need is already need itself. Gibran sets out the kinds of givers. Some give little and seek recognition. Some have little and give it all, and their coffer is never empty. The purest give the way the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space, without pain, without seeking joy, without thinking of virtue, and through their hands God speaks. All we have will one day be given, so the season of giving should be ours and not our heirs'. Gibran then takes apart the habit of giving only to the deserving. Trees and flocks give so that they may live, for to withhold is to perish. Whoever is worthy of his days and nights is worthy of all else from us. Life gives unto life, and the one who thinks himself the giver is only a witness. To receivers, who are all of us, Gibran says to carry no weight of gratitude, and to rise with the giver on his gifts as on wings.

Eating and drinking are acts of worship. Life must take life to go on living, and Gibran does not hide this. He asks that the taking be made holy: the table becomes an altar, and what is innocent in forest and field is offered to what is still more innocent in man. Over the slain beast the eater says that the same power slays him too, and that one law carries both into a mightier hand. Over the apple he promises that its seeds will live and blossom in his heart. Over the grapes he names himself a vineyard whose fruit will also be gathered for the winepress and kept like new wine in eternal vessels. In winter each cup of wine is drunk with a song that remembers the autumn, the vineyard and the press. Every meal joins the eater to the eaten, and both feed the one life that holds them.

Work is love made visible. It is not a curse laid on humanity. It is the way the soul keeps pace with the earth and fulfils a part of earth's furthest dream, given to each person when that dream was born. To be idle is to step out of life's procession, while to labour is to become a flute through which the hours turn to music. Gibran answers the old belief that life is darkness with an ascending chain. Urge is blind without knowledge, knowledge is vain without work, and work is empty without love. Working with love binds a person to himself, to others, and to God. To work in this way is to weave, build, and sow as though the beloved would wear the cloth, live in the house, and eat the fruit. Gibran sets aside any ranking of the sculptor above the ploughman, since the wind speaks as sweetly to the grass as to the oak. He closes with a warning that what is made without love carries its own lack: bread baked with indifference feeds only half a hunger, and a grudge at the winepress distils poison into the wine.

Joy and sorrow rise from one source. They are a single life showing two faces. Gibran teaches that the well from which laughter springs was first filled with tears, and that sorrow, by carving deeper into the self, widens the space joy can fill. The cup was fired in the potter's oven and the lute was hollowed with knives, and in the same way what delights us is what once wounded us, and what we weep for is what was once our delight. Gibran then answers those who quarrel over which is greater by naming the two inseparable. When one sits at the table, the other sleeps upon the bed. The soul hangs like scales between them, still only when empty, and it must rise or fall whenever life lifts it to be weighed.

A house is the larger body of the soul. It grows in the sun, sleeps at night and dreams of grove and hilltop, and it should first be built of imaginings, as a bower in the wilderness, before it is raised within city walls. Gibran asks what the people truly keep behind their fastened doors: peace, remembrance and beauty, or only comfort. The lust for comfort comes in as a guest, becomes a host, and then a master. With silken hands and an iron heart it tames the larger desires and murders the passion of the soul. Yet the people are children of space, restless in rest, and cannot be trapped. Their house is to be a mast and not an anchor, an eyelid that guards the eye, and never a tomb made by the dead for the living. What is boundless in them lives only in the mansion of the sky.

Garments hide much of our beauty and none of what is unbeautiful in us. The privacy we look for in them can turn into a harness and a chain. Life breathes in the sunlight and reaches toward us in the wind, and Gibran asks his hearers to meet both with more of their skin and less of their covering. When the people say the north wind wove their clothes, he agrees, but adds that shame was the loom and the softening of the sinews was the thread, and that the wind laughed in the forest when the work was done. Modesty is a shield against the eye of the unclean, and where the unclean no longer exists, modesty becomes a fetter and a fouling of the mind. Gibran closes with the earth, which delights to feel bare feet, and the winds, which long to play with the hair.

The market place is a sacred place. The earth gives her fruit freely, and abundance comes through exchanging her gifts. Unless that exchange is made in love and kindly justice, though, it feeds greed in some and hunger in others. Gibran asks the toilers of sea, field and vineyard, and the weavers, potters and gatherers of spices, to call the master spirit of the earth into their trading so that the scales themselves are made holy. Those who would sell words for another's labour are turned gently back to the field and the net, where the land and sea will provide for them as well. The singers, dancers and flute players also bring true goods, food and raiment for the soul fashioned of dreams. The teaching ends on one measure of a just market: no one leaves with empty hands, because the spirit of the earth cannot rest until the least are satisfied.

The god-self in each person stays undefiled, like the ocean and the sun. Crime and punishment belong only to the man in us, who stands between that god-self and the sleeping pigmy that has not yet woken. Gibran answers a judge by refusing to make the wrongdoer a stranger. The holy cannot rise above the highest in each of us, and the wicked cannot fall below the lowest in us. A leaf does not turn yellow without the silent knowledge of the whole tree, and in the same way no one does wrong without the hidden will of all. Humanity walks together as one procession toward its god-self, and whoever falls is a warning to those behind and a reproach to those ahead who never moved the stumbling stone. Victim and offender, righteous and felon, are woven together like black and white thread, so the weaver must examine the whole cloth and the loom as well. Whoever would judge must weigh the heart of the injured party too and look to the roots of the evil tree, where good and bad are entwined. Remorse is already justice at work, and no court can grant it or take it away. Seen in full light, the upright and the fallen are one man standing in twilight, and the corner-stone is no higher than the lowest stone of the foundation.

Laws made by human hands are sand-towers on the shore of an ocean of life. The innocent build them and knock them down with laughter, and the ocean laughs with them and brings more sand. Some hold life to be a rock, though, and use the law as a chisel to carve others in their own likeness. Gibran names them in a run of images: the cripple who hates dancers, the ox who loves his yoke and scorns the deer, the old serpent who calls others naked because he cannot shed his own skin, and the overfed guest who declares every feast a violation. Such people stand in the sunlight with their backs to the sun. They see only their shadows, and their shadows are their laws. Whoever walks facing the sun cannot be held by images traced on the earth. Freedom that harms no one answers to no outside judge. The chapter closes on a song that no command can silence.

Freedom worshipped as a goal becomes the strongest chain of all. Gibran sees people bowing before their own liberty the way slaves praise a tyrant, and he teaches that true freedom does not come when life is emptied of care and grief. It comes when those things still surround a life and the soul rises above them naked and unbound. Every bond a person would throw off was fastened by that person's own hand. The unjust law is written on one's own forehead, the despot's throne stands within, the chosen care was never imposed, and fear lives in the heart and not in the hand of the feared. The desired and the dreaded move within the self as lights and shadows in pairs that cling. When one shadow fades, the light that remains becomes a shadow to a further light, so each freedom won becomes the fetter of a greater freedom.

Reason and passion are not rivals but partners. Together they carry the soul across its sea. Gibran begins with the soul as a battlefield, where judgment wars against appetite, and he says no outside peacemaker can end that war. The soul itself must become the lover of all its elements. Reason is the rudder and passion is the sail, and if either is broken the soul drifts or stands still. Reason left to rule alone confines, and passion left untended burns itself out. So reason must be raised to the height of passion until it sings, and passion must be guided by reason until it rises daily, like the phoenix, from its own ashes. Gibran then calls the two powers guests to be honoured equally. He closes with two pictures of the divine: God resting in the stillness of the hills, and God moving in the storm. Each person is a breath in God's sphere, and so is made to rest in reason and move in passion.

Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses understanding. Gibran likens it to the stone of a fruit, which must split open so that its heart may stand in the sun. A heart that keeps its wonder at the daily miracles of life finds pain no less wondrous than joy. It accepts the seasons of the heart as it has always accepted the seasons over its fields, and it watches the winters of grief with serenity. Gibran then turns inward: much of our pain is self-chosen, a bitter potion that the physician within prepares to heal the sick self. He asks the hearer to drink it in silence and tranquillity. The physician's heavy hand is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, and the burning cup is shaped from clay the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

The heart already holds in silence the secrets of the days and the nights. Self-knowledge is therefore not the getting of something new. It is the rising into words of what the soul has always known. Gibran honours the longing to hear and touch this inner knowledge, and he lets the hidden well-spring run murmuring to the sea. Then he forbids every attempt to weigh or measure it, for the self is a sea boundless and measureless. From this follows a humility of speech. No one finds the truth, only a truth. No one finds the path of the soul, only meets the soul walking upon his own path, because the soul walks upon all paths. It does not move along a line or grow like a reed. It unfolds like a lotus of countless petals.

Gibran teaches that no one can give another what he knows. A teacher can only wake what already lies half asleep in the learner. The teacher who walks among his followers gives his faith and his love, not his wisdom. A truly wise teacher does not invite you into the house of his own understanding. He leads you to the threshold of your own mind. Gibran makes this plain through three figures: the astronomer, the musician and the man of numbers. Each can speak of what he has grasped, but none can hand over his understanding, his ear or his journey. The vision of one person lends no wings to another. Each soul stands alone in God's knowledge, and so each must come alone to its own knowledge of God and of the earth.

A friend is your needs answered: a field sown with love and reaped with thanksgiving, a board and a fireside where hunger is fed and peace is found. Gibran teaches that true friendship lets both the yes and the no be spoken freely, and that in its silences heart goes on listening to heart, so that thoughts and desires are born and shared without words. Parting brings no grief, for what is loved most in a friend shows more clearly in his absence, as a mountain shows more clearly from the plain. Friendship has no purpose but the deepening of the spirit. Love that seeks any gain is a net that catches only what is worthless. Give your friend your best, your flood as well as your ebb. Seek him with hours to live, never with hours to kill, for he is there to fill your need and not your emptiness. Gibran closes in lightness: laughter and shared pleasures belong to friendship, because the heart finds its morning in the dew of little things.

Talk begins when a person is no longer at peace with their own thoughts. When the heart can no longer bear its own solitude, a person moves out into the lips, and sound turns into diversion. Gibran holds that much talking half murders thinking, because thought is a bird of space that may spread its wings inside a cage of words but cannot fly there. He then names those who speak. Some look for talkative company because they fear being alone, since silence shows them their naked selves. Some reveal a truth they do not understand. Some carry truth within and never put it into words, and in them the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence. The chapter closes with the right use of speech. When friends meet, the spirit within should move the lips, so that the voice within the voice speaks to the ear of the other's ear. What is spoken from the heart in this way is kept by the soul, as the taste of wine is remembered after the colour is forgotten and the vessel is gone.

Time is measureless, and the timeless in us already knows that life itself is timeless. When an astronomer asks about time, Gibran answers that people try to measure what cannot be measured. They govern their conduct and even their spirit by hours and seasons, and they sit beside time as if it were a stream flowing past them. Yet yesterday is only today's memory and tomorrow only today's dream. What sings and contemplates in us still dwells within the first moment that scattered the stars into space. Gibran turns to love to show this. Love is boundless, yet it rests whole at the centre of our being and does not pass from one loving thought or deed to the next. Time is the same, undivided and paceless. If the mind must still divide time into seasons, let each season hold all the others, and let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.

Evil has no life of its own. It is good tortured by its own hunger and thirst, good that seeks food in dark caves and drinks even of dead waters. Gibran will speak only of the good in his hearers. Through a series of paired sayings he shows that every falling short is something other than evil. The divided self is only a divided house. The one who seeks gain is a root drawing from the earth. Stumbling speech can still strengthen a weak tongue, and those who limp do not go backward. Goodness lies in the longing for one's giant self, and that longing lives in everyone. In some it is a torrent rushing to the sea, in others a slow stream lingering in its bends. So the strong are warned against pretending to limp before the lame, and the truly good do not ask the naked where their garment is.

Prayer is the expansion of the self into the living ether, and it belongs to joy and abundance as much as to distress and need. Gibran teaches that in prayer the soul rises to meet, in a temple invisible, all who pray at that same hour, and that this meeting is its own fulfilment. Whoever enters only to ask, or to be humbled, or even to plead for others, is not heard, for it is enough to enter. No one can be taught to pray in words, since God hears only the words He Himself speaks through the lips. The true prayer is that of the seas, forests and mountains, heard in the stillness of the night: a prayer that asks for nothing, because the Divine is already the will, the desire and the need within us, and in giving more of Himself gives all.

Pleasure is a freedom-song but not freedom itself. It is the blossoming of desire, not its fruit, and the caged soul taking wing, not space encompassed. Gibran asks that it be sung with a full heart, without losing the heart in the singing. He turns to three kinds of people. The young who seek pleasure as if it were everything are not to be rebuked, for in seeking they will find her seven sisters, each more beautiful than she. The elders who look back on their pleasures with regret should remember them with gratitude, as they would a summer's harvest, since regret clouds the mind and does not cleanse it. Those who shun pleasure for fear of offending the spirit take pleasure in their very refusal, and the spirit is no still pool that a staff can trouble. Desire that is denied is only stored away. The body knows its rightful need and is the harp of the soul, which can give out sweet music or confused sounds. Good pleasure is known by the bee and the flower, for whom giving and receiving are one need and one ecstasy.

Beauty cannot be sought as an object, because she herself is the way, the guide, and the weaver of any speech about her. Gibran gathers the voices of the people: the injured find her gentle, the passionate find her terrible, the weary hear her whisper, the restless hear her roar, and the watchmen, toilers, snow-bound and reapers each place her in some season or hour still to come. All of them, Gibran answers, have spoken not of beauty but of their own needs unsatisfied. Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy, not a thirsting mouth or an outstretched hand but a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted, an image seen with eyes closed and a song heard with ears shut. In the closing lines he discloses the hearers to themselves: beauty is life unveiling her holy face and eternity gazing at itself in a mirror, and they are at once the life and the veil, the eternity and the mirror.

Religion is not one part of life set apart from the rest. It is every deed and every reflection, and also the wonder that springs up in the soul while the hands are busy at stone or loom. When an old priest asks about religion, Gibran answers that he has spoken of nothing else all day. No one can divide his hours between God and self, or between soul and body, because every hour is a wing beating from self to self. Morality worn like a best garment, ethics that cage the song-bird, and worship opened and shut like a window all fall short of a soul whose windows stand open from dawn to dawn. Daily life is the temple. Whoever enters it brings all his work and all his fellow men, since no one can rise in prayer above his own achievements or above other people's hopes. God is not found by solving riddles. He is seen playing with children, walking in the cloud, and smiling in flowers.

Life and death are one, as the river and the sea are one, and the secret of death is found only in the heart of life. Gibran teaches that whoever turns away from life is like the owl blind to the day, unable to unveil the mystery of light. The soul already holds a silent knowledge of the beyond in its deepest hopes and desires, as seeds beneath the snow dream of spring, and these dreams hide the gate to eternity. The fear of death is the trembling of a shepherd about to be honoured by his king: beneath it lies joy, though the trembling holds his attention more. Gibran then reveals death as release. To die is to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun, and to free the breath so it may rise and seek God unencumbered. He closes with three reversals. Song begins in silence, the true climb begins at the summit, and the true dance begins when the earth claims the limbs.

What a person truly is cannot be held by a body, a house or a field. It is a free spirit that dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind. In this closing chapter Gibran gathers the whole teaching into one disclosure: within every hearer lives the vast man, a giant oak covered with apple blossoms, whose might binds us to earth and in whose durability we are deathless. We are as strong as our strongest link, not only as weak as our weakest, and no one should be measured by the foam of their smallest deed. The seer says he came to take wisdom rather than to give it, and found something greater: a flame spirit ever gathering more of itself. He answers those who called him proud or aloof, showing that true giving does not know itself and that one is near only by being far. He tells his hearers that what seems most feeble in them, breath and forgotten dream, is the strongest and most determined, and that when the veil is lifted they will bless darkness as they bless light. Then, promising to return with the tide and be borne by another woman, he sails eastward into the mist while Almitra keeps his words in her heart.