The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

[4] Born a Maronite, Gibran was influenced not only by his own religion but also by the Bahá’í Faith, Islam, and the mysticism of the Sufis.

[6]: p55  Connections and parallels have also been made to William Blake's work,[7] as well as the theological ideas of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson such as reincarnation and the Over-soul.

Themes of influence in his work were Arabic art, European Classicism (particularly Leonardo da Vinci) and Romanticism (Blake and Auguste Rodin), the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and more modern symbolism and surrealism.

[6]: p165  In 1928,[12] at the screening of a film about `Abdu'l-Bahá, Gibran proclaimed in tears the exalted station the leader held, and left the event weeping still.

[13] Shorter copyright terms had already made it public domain in the European Union,[14] Canada,[15] Russia,[16] South Africa,[17] and Australia.

Founded in 1935, the GNC is a non-profit corporation with exclusive rights to manage Gibran's copyright in his literary and artistic works.