Paulo Coelho Quotes

The roller coaster is my life; Life is a fast, dizzying game. Life is a parachute jump; it's taking chances; falling over and getting up again. It's mountaineering; it's wanting to get to the very top of yourself and to feel angry and dissatisfied when you don't manage it.But if we are talking in terms of making progress in life, we must understand that good enough is very different from the Best.

~ Paulo Coelho

Don't try to be useful. Try to be yourself: that is enough & that makes all the difference.

~ Paulo Coelho

That's who I am, a man who has been both good and evil throughout his life. pg 14

~ Paulo Coelho

I lost the most precious thing a man can have: my faith in my fellow man. I laughed and I wept at God's irony, at the absurd way he had chosen to demonstrate to me that I was an instrument of Good and Evil.

~ Paulo Coelho

You're not trying to find the answer to a question, you're simply trying to confirm something you desperately want to believe: that everyone is evil.

~ Paulo Coelho

...she was betting on the fact that people were basically good, despite all the Evil in the world.

~ Paulo Coelho

These are people who accept the fire of the Holy Spirit,' he said, 'the fire that is left behind but that is used by so few people to light their candles.

~ Paulo Coelho

With every day that passed, the boy's heart became more and moresilent. It no longer wanted to know about things of the past or future; it was content simply tocontemplate the desert, and to drink with the boy from the Soul of the World. The boy and his heart hadbecome friends, and neither was capable now of betraying the other. When his heart spoke to him, it was to provide a stimulus to the boy, and to give him strength, becausethe days of silence there in the desert were wearisome. His heart told the boy what his strongest qualitieswere: his courage in having given up his sheep and in trying to live out his destiny, and his enthusiasmduring the time he had worked at the crystal shop.

~ Paulo Coelho

I could have.What does this phrase mean? At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have heppened but, didn't. The magic moments go unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.

~ Paulo Coelho

Break the glass, please, and free us from all these damned rules, from needing to find an explanation for everything, from doing only what others approve of.

~ Paulo Coelho

But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggle for your dreams than to be defeated without ever even knowing what you’re fighting for

~ Paulo Coelho

This was the kiss I had waited for so long - a kiss born by the river of our childhood, when we didn't yet know what love meant. A kiss that had been suspended in the air as we grew, that had traveled in the world in the souvenir of a medal, and that had remained hidden behind piles of books. A kiss that had been lost and now was found. In the moment of that kiss were years of searching, disillusionment and impossible dreams.

~ Paulo Coelho

He learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke - the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was live. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes meet . . .

~ Paulo Coelho

Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: ‘the book is so much better than the film.

~ Paulo Coelho

What people regard as vanity—leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one's name from being forgotten—I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.

~ Paulo Coelho

But I'm afraid that it would be all be a disappointment, so I prefer just to dream about it.

~ Paulo Coelho

Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don't want to do so.

~ Paulo Coelho

If you start out by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work toward getting it.

~ Paulo Coelho

It's a good idea always to do something relaxing prior to making an important decision in your life.

~ Paulo Coelho

In a forest of a hundred thousand trees, no two leaves are alike. And no two journeys along the same path are alike.

~ Paulo Coelho

Here was the opportunity to free herself from all those identical days and nights. pg 30

~ Paulo Coelho

If I can learn to understand this language without words, I can learn to understand the world.

~ Paulo Coelho

When someone sees the same people every day(...)they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someoneisn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

~ Paulo Coelho

When someone sees the same people every day(...)they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own

~ Paulo Coelho

A disciple...can never imitate his guide's steps. You have your own way of living your life, of dealing with problems, and of winning. Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.

~ Paulo Coelho

The battles may last for a long time, perhaps even years. There are powerful forces on both sides, and the war is important to both armies. It's not a battle of good against evil. It's a war between forces that are fighting for the balance of power, and, when that type of battle begins, it lasts longer than others-because Allah is on both sides.

~ Paulo Coelho

life is really generous to those who pursue their Personal Legend

~ Paulo Coelho

people who believed the world to be an undignified,inglorious place, and who spent their evenings and nightstalking on and on about the mistakes others had made. They werepeople whom solitude had made into the judges of the world,whose verdicts were scattered to the four winds for whoever caredto listen

~ Paulo Coelho

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it's how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

~ Paulo Coelho

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

~ Paulo Coelho

With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated.

~ Paulo Coelho

Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.

~ Paulo Coelho

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

~ Paulo Coelho

I'm not saying that love always takes you to heaven. Your life can become a nightmare. But that said, it is worth taking the risk.

~ Paulo Coelho

Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.

~ Paulo Coelho

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

~ Paulo Coelho

I always was a rich person because money's not related to happiness.

~ Paulo Coelho

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

~ Paulo Coelho

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

~ Paulo Coelho

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you're really tired. It's my relaxing time.

~ Paulo Coelho