This line is from Chapin’s 1860 collection of sermons and addresses, Living Words, decades before Kahlil Gibran was even born. It is one of the most widely recirculated misattributions on quote sites today.
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls” Not Kahlil Gibran — this line is from Edwin Hubbell Chapin's 1860 book Living Words.
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Evoking the world of Kahlil Gibran — Lebanese-American writer, poet & artist. Theme: "Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The source
Work
Living Words
Author
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
First published
1860, Boston: A. Tompkins
Page
p. 185 (1861 Harvard Library scan)
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation-robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gates of heaven.
The popular quote circulating online truncates this passage to its first clause and often alters “seamed” to “seared.”
First published in 1860, over a century before the 1931 cutoff for automatic U.S. public-domain status, and Chapin died in 1880 — the text carries no surviving copyright.
Fact-check
Often misattributed
This is a textbook case of a real 19th-century quotation drifting onto a more famous, unrelated name over a century later.
✕
Attributed the entire line to the wrong author and, in some cases, invented a source book for it.Kahlil Gibran
Quote-aggregator sites such as Goodreads, BrainyQuote, and QuoteFancy attribute the line to Gibran, and at least one blog claims (incorrectly) that it comes from The Prophet ↗; no such passage exists in that or any other Gibran work.
✓Wikiquote lists the line under Gibran’s Misattributed section ↗, crediting it to Edwin Hubbell Chapin (as quoted in an 1895 quotation dictionary); Wikiquote’s own Chapin page ↗ traces it to his 1860 Living Words, p. 185.
Context
Why it mattered
This inspirational line about suffering forging “the strongest souls” circulates on nearly every quote-aggregator site attributed to Kahlil Gibran, and is sometimes even claimed to come from The Prophet. It does not appear anywhere in Gibran’s actual writings.
The real author is Edwin Hubbell Chapin, a 19th-century American Universalist minister renowned in his day as a pulpit orator. The line comes from his 1860 book Living Words, a collection of his sermons and addresses, and originally continues: “…the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation-robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gates of heaven.”
The most massive characters are seamed with scars.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1883–1931 · Lebanese-American writer, poet & artist
Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanese-American writer and artist best known for The Prophet (1923), a collection of poetic essays that became one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century. Because his aphoristic style is so widely imitated, his name is frequently attached — wrongly — to sentimental lines he never wrote, including this one.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
Chapin, Edwin Hubbell. Living Words. Boston: A. Tompkins, 1860, p. 185.
MLA (9th ed.)
Chapin, Edwin Hubbell. Living Words. A. Tompkins, 1860, p. 185.
APA (7th ed.)
Chapin, E. H. (1860). Living words. A. Tompkins.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/out-of-suffering-have-emerged-the-strongest-souls