Paulo Coelho Quotes (230 Quotes)






    All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.



    She was doing it because she had nothing to lose, because her life was one of constant, day to day frustration.



    In the long run, what people think about shepherds and bakers becomes more important for them than their own Personal Legends.



    When you make a decision, you are really diving in a strong current that will bring you to places you never dreamed of when you first made that decision

    Love fills everything. It cannot be desired because it is an end in itself. It cannot betray because it has nothing to do with possession. It cannot be held prisoner because it is a river and will overflow its banks. Anyone who tries to imprison love will cut off the spring that feeds it, and the trapped water will grow stagnant.


    She didn't quite know what the relationship was between lunatics and the moon, but it must be a strong one, if they used a word like that to describe the insane.


    If you want to achieve your objectives, you have to be prepared for a daily dose of pain or discomfort. At first, it's unpleasant and demotivating, but in time you come to realise that it's part of the process of feeling good, and the moment arrives when, if you don't feel pain, you have a sense that the exercises aren't having the desired effect.

    She wasn't a victim of fate, she was running her own risks, pushing beyond her own limits, experiencing things which, one day, in the silence of her heart, in the tedium of old age, she would remember almost with nostalgia - however absurd that might seem.



    Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our souls, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.

    People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them.

    The wise men understood that this natural world is only an image and a copy of paradise. The existence of this world is simply a guarantee that there exists a world that is perfect. God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom.


    Many of us are returning from a long journey during which we were forced to search for things that were of no interest to us. Now we realize that they were false. But this return cannot be made without pain, because we have been away for a long time and feel that we are strangers in out own land. It will take some time to find the friends who also left, and the places where our roots and treasures lie. But this will happen.

    Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn't care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.

    She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors--white, black, yellow--with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone's, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before, and she gave herself to all that was most base and most pure.

    Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or--such is the pleasure they experience--they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.




    He told himself that he would have to start reading thicker books: they lasted longer, and made more comfortable pillows.



    There must be a language that doesn't depend on words, the boy thought… He was learning lots of new things. Some of them were things that he had already experienced, and weren't really new, but that he had never perceived before. And he hadn't perceived them because he had become accustomed to them…




    She would consider each day a miracle - which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences.

    The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

    Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

    We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.

    Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

    There's a lot of me in it. But the character is more egotistical. I'm also egotistical, but not the way the character is. This guy is successful, he has everything, but his wife has left him. The most important value - love - is missing. What is wrong with this institution called 'marriage' What is wrong with this institution called 'the pursuit of happiness'

    Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned perhaps she won't suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when the person looks back-she will hear her heart.

    When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.

    Why do we have to listen to our hearts' 'Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you'll find your treasure.''But my heart is agitated,' the boy said. 'It has its dreams, it gets emotional, and it's become passionate over a woman of the desert. It asks things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights, when I'm thinking about her.' 'Well, that's good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.

    No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone's eyes.

    It's the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary only wise men are able to understand them.


    Related Authors


    Paulo Coelho - Leo Tolstoy - Charles Dickens - Umberto Eco - Tom Clancy - Robert Ludlum - James Clavell - Jack Higgins - Anne Rice - Anne Bronte


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