In a distant, timeless place, a mysterious prophet walks the sands. At the moment of his departure, he wishes to offer the people gifts but possesses nothing. The people gather round, each asks a question of the heart, and the man's wisdom is his gift. It is Gibran's gift to us, as well, for Gibran's prophet is rivaled in his wisdom only by the founders of the world's great religions. On the most basic topics--marriage, children, friendship, work, pleasure--his words have a power and lucidity that in another era would surely have provoked the description "divinely inspired." Free of dogma, free of power structures and metaphysics, consider these poetic, moving aphorisms a 20th-century supplement to all sacred traditions--as millions of other readers already have. --Brian Bruya

Poet, philosopher, and artist, was born in Lebanon, a land that has produced many prophets.

The millions of Arabic-speaking peoples familiar with his writings in that language consider him the genius of his age.

But he was a man whose fame and influence spread far beyond the Near East. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages.

His drawings and paintings have been exhibited in the great capitals of the world and compared by Auguste Rodin to the work of William Blake.

In the United States, which he made his home during the last twenty years of his life, he began to write in English.

The Prophet and his other books of poetry, illustrated with his mystical drawings, are known and loved by innumerable Americans who find in them an expression of the deepest impulses of man's heart and mind.

This quotation is from The Prophet's dust jacket, published by Knopf, NY