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Who really said it

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain

Written by Kahlil Gibran 1883–1931 · Lebanese-American poet, writer & visual artist
Verified Free to reuse

Genuine, and word for word. The line appears in the chapter “On Joy and Sorrow” in The Prophet, which Gibran wrote in English and Alfred A. Knopf published in New York in 1923. It reads the same in Project Gutenberg’s transcription of the 1923 text ↗ and in a scanned 1926 Heinemann printing ↗.

Last verified 18 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain” Kahlil Gibran, "On Joy and Sorrow," The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923). Verified against the full text via Quotle.info

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Evoking the world of Kahlil Gibran — Lebanese-American poet, writer & visual artist. Theme: "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain". 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
The Prophet
Chapter
“On Joy and Sorrow”
First published
1923 · Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Translation
None — Gibran wrote The Prophet in English

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? On Joy and Sorrow

The famous sentence is the fourth line of the chapter, not its conclusion — the potter’s oven and the hollowed lute are what Gibran offers as proof.

Scanned printing
Page images of a 1926 Heinemann printing at the Internet Archive
The Prophet, complete text at Project Gutenberg

How we checked it

  • We searched the complete text of The Prophet at Project Gutenberg ↗ — a transcription whose title page reads “New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923” — and found the sentence intact in the chapter “On Joy and Sorrow.”
  • We confirmed it a second time against a physical book: the text of the scanned London/Heinemann 1926 printing at the Internet Archive ↗ carries the identical wording, including the word “that.”
  • The Academy of American Poets ↗ publishes “On Joy and Sorrow” and credits it to The Prophet (Knopf, 1923), noting the text is in the public domain.
  • Quote Investigator has no entry for this line, and Wikiquote’s Kahlil Gibran page does not list it among his misattributed quotations ↗ — consistent with what the primary text shows: this one is really his.
Public domain

The Prophet was first published in 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York, well before the 1931 United States copyright cutoff, and Gibran wrote it in English — so there is no separate translation copyright to consider. Project Gutenberg ↗ lists the work as public domain in the USA and hosts the complete text.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The credit is right — the wording usually isn’t

This is one of the rare famous-name quotations that survives checking: Gibran wrote it, in a book you can read for free. What does not survive is the exact sentence. The version in general circulation is a word short, and it almost never arrives with a source attached.

“The deeper sorrow carves into your being…” The common variant

The most-shared form drops the word “that.” Gibran wrote “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being.” The shortened version is what The Quotations Page ↗ prints, and even Wikiquote’s own The Prophet page ↗ lists it that way under “On Joy and Sorrow.”

An unsourced inspirational caption

The line normally travels with a name and nothing else — no book, no chapter, no year. Cut loose from the passage, it reads as reassurance; in place it is the setup for the potter’s oven and the hollowed lute that follow it in the 1923 text ↗.

“Khalil Gibran” / “Gibran Khalil Gibran”

All the same man. He was born Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān and is usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran ↗ — the spelling printed on the 1923 title page. A different spelling is not a different attribution.

Kahlil Gibran wrote it, in English, in the chapter “On Joy and Sorrow” in The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923) — and the sentence he wrote begins “The deeper that sorrow carves…”, as the full text at Project Gutenberg ↗ shows.

Context

Why the line lands

Gibran is not offering consolation here — he is describing a mechanism. The sentence sits inside an argument that joy and sorrow are one capacity measured from two ends, and it is immediately followed by two images that do the actual work: the cup that holds your wine is the cup that was fired in the potter’s oven, and the lute that soothes you is wood that was hollowed with knives. Grief is not the price of joy in this reading; it is the excavation that makes room for it.

The Prophet arrived in 1923 as a slim book of twenty-six prose-poetry fables and became one of the best-selling books ever published, never once going out of print. That reach is exactly why its lines travel so far from home: this one circulates daily on condolence cards, in eulogies and across social feeds, usually with no book, chapter or year attached — and often a word short of what Gibran actually wrote.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

How the passage is built

The chapter opens with a woman asking the prophet Almustafa to speak of joy and sorrow, and his first answer is a definition rather than comfort: “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.” The carving line is the third beat of that argument, arriving as an answer to his own rhetorical “And how else can it be?”

The chapter closes on a balance image — you are “suspended like scales” between sorrow and joy, and only emptiness holds still. Quoted alone, the carving sentence reads as encouragement; read in place, it is closer to a description of how a person is shaped.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Resilience Happiness Growth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

The Prophet — full textgutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg’s complete transcription of the 1923 Knopf edition, listed as public domain in the USA. The line is in the chapter “On Joy and Sorrow.”
Scanned 1926 Heinemann printingarchive.org

A page-image scan of the London edition at the Internet Archive; its text carries the same wording, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being.”
The Prophet on Wikisourceen.wikisource.org

A second free full-text transcription, useful for reading “On Joy and Sorrow” straight through in context.
“On Joy and Sorrow”poets.org

The Academy of American Poets publishes the chapter as a poem and credits it to The Prophet (Knopf, 1923), noting the text is public domain.
Wikiquote: The Propheten.wikiquote.org

A sourced quotation page for the book — and an example of the shortened variant, since it lists the line under “On Joy and Sorrow” without the word “that.”
The Prophet (book)en.wikipedia.org

Publication history: twenty-six prose-poetry fables written in English, first published 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf, never out of print.

The author

Who was Kahlil Gibran?

Kahlil Gibran

1883–1931 · Lebanese-American poet, writer & visual artist

Born Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān in Bsharri, in what is now Lebanon, Gibran emigrated to Boston as a boy and built a double career as a painter and a writer, working first in Arabic and later in English. The Prophet, his 1923 collection of twenty-six prose-poetry fables, is the book that made him a household name: it has never gone out of print and has been translated into more than a hundred languages. He died in New York in 1931, aged forty-eight, and is one of the best-selling poets in the language — which is also why his name attracts so much wisdom he never wrote.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this source

Kahlil Gibran, “On Joy and Sorrow,” in The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923). Full text at Project Gutenberg, ebook #58585.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain’?” Last verified 18 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-deeper-that-sorrow-carves-into-your-being-the-more-joy/

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