Top 2109 Quotes & Sayings by Paulo Coelho - Page 33

Going after what I believe in.

And although she was sometimes dissatisfied with herself, she felt unable to go beyond her own limitations. Books were safer.

I don't care whether it was once sacred or not, I HATE WHAT I DO. It's destroying my soul, making me lose touch with myself, teaching me that pain is a reward, that money buys everything and justifies everything.

God, I am trying to recover my faith. Please don't abandon me in the middle of this adventure, I prayed, pushing my fears aside.

If one day I could get out of here, I would allow myself to be crazy. Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they're crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to.

Happiness is the only goal worth pursuing

You could cry, get worried or angry like any other normal human being, as long as you remembered that, up above, your spirit was laughing out loud at all those thorny situations.

Only the defeated know LOVE. because it is in the realm of love that we fight our first battles - and generally lose.

Without solitude, Love will not stay long by your side.

Wait. This was the first lesson I had learned about love. The day drags along, you make thousands of plans, you imagine every possible conversation, you promise to change your behavior in certain ways -- and you feel more and more anxious until your loved one arrives. But by then, you don't know what to say. The hours of waiting have been transformed into tension, the tension has become fear, and the fear makes you embarrassed about showing affection.

The closer one gets to realizing his destiny, the more that destiny becomes his true reason for being.

The best way to weaken one's enemy was to get him to believe that you were on his side.

Well, let's distinguish religion from spirituality. I am Catholic, so religion for me is a way of having discipline and collective worship with persons who share the same mystery.

I love you like a river that begins as a solitary trickle in the mountains and gradually grows and joins other rivers until, after a certain point, it can flow around any obstacle in order to get where it wants.

But love is much like a dam; if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current.

They were so ignorant, so naive, so resigned to their lot. They refused to believe anything that didn't fit in with what they were used to believing.

Defeat is for the valiant. Only they will know the honor of losing and the joy of winning.

I believe everything is one thing only. That said, there are some questions in my life that I don't know.. I've stopped asking. At the very beginning of my life, I wanted to have answers for everything. And now I respect the fact that I can't have answers for everything.

Life is too short, or too long, for me to allow myself the luxury of living it so badly.

That is what the forest taught me. That you will never be mine, and that is why I will never lose you...." ......... "I will always remember you, and you will remember me, just as we will remember the evening, the rain on the window, and all the things we'll always have because we cannot possess them

Spending years studying at university only to find out at the end of it all that you're unemployable.

Postpone joy, it will diminish. Postpone a problem, it will grow.

In dire times you can lose joy, but you can't lose hope. Hope is your guide.

Our sexual energy, when not properly mastered, is transformed into anger.

When you must choose a new path, do not bring old experiences with you. Those who strike out afresh, but who attempt to retain a little of the old life, end up torn apart by their own memories.

Whenever he saw the sea, or a fire, he fell silent, impressed by their elemental force.

If you're a nobody, if your work has no impact, then it deserves to be praised. If, however, you climb out of that state of mediocrity and are a success, then your defying 'the law' and deserve to be punished.

Anything that makes us forget who we are and what we want; that way we can work in order to produce, reproduce, and earn money.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

Because I don't live in either my past or my future.I'm interested only in the present".

Time does not pass, it merely changes.

she considered the possibility of telling her about everything that was happening, but then she changed her mind; people never learn anything by being told; they have to find out for themselves.

Close cycles. Not because of pride or arrogance, but because that no longer fits your life

So for the question I go to the mystery of it and say I don't know. I only know that I am alive and there is something that manifests in my life, that it is God and one day I am going to understand my life, probably in the day that I die, or afterwards. But I try to find good questions and not good answers.

What do you want? You can't want to be happy, because that's too easy and too boring. You can't want only to love, because that's impossible. What do you want? You want to justify your life, to live it as intensely as possible. That is at once a trap and a source of ecstasy. Try to be alert to that danger and experience the joy and the adventure of being that woman who is beyond the image reflected in the mirror.

it is only courage on the path itself that makes the path appear

People who are on a spiritual quest don't think, they simply want results.

I knew it,’ she says. ‘I knew I had met you before. I knew it the first time I saw your photograph. It’s as if we had to meet again at some point in this life. I talked to my friends about it, but they thought I was crazy, that thousands of people must say the same thing about thousands of other people every day. I thought they must be right, but life… life brought you to me. You came to find me, didn’t you?

In any activity, we have to know what to expect, how to reach our objectives and what capacity we possess for the proposed task. The only people who can say they have renounced the fruit are those who, thus equipped, feel no desire for the results of the conquest, and remain absorbed in combat. You can renounce the fruit, but this renunciation does not mean indifference toward the result.

Setting out rules for waging war (the Geneva Convention).

I think that we are starting to get much more conscious about, you know, the importance of the spiritual path, and we are fulfilling it by paying attention to ourselves.

Don't allow anyone to steal your joy.

The soul loves all things beautiful and deep.

Come on, let's go. Crazy people do crazy things.

That's how love got lost ... when we started laying down rules for when love should or shouldn't appear.

A warrior balances solitude and dependence.

If there hadn't been a sixth day, man would not exist; copper would always be copper; and lead just lead. It's true that everything has its Personal Legend, but one day that Personal Legend will be realized. So each thing has to transform itself into something better, and to acquire a new Personal Legend, until, someday, the Soul of the World becomes one thing only.

I don't know what to do. I only know that it's taken me years to understand that life was pushing me in a direction I didn't want to go in.

Travelling to past lives is like making a hole in the floor and letting the flames of the fire in the apartment below scorch and burn the present

fanaticism is the only way to put an end to the doubts that constantly trouble the human soul.

The future would end up finding out the truth about the past.

A miracle happened: another day of life.

Remember your dreams and fight for them.

The desert takes our dreams away from us, and they don't always return. We know that, and we are used to it. Those who don't return become a part of the clouds, a part of the animals that hide in the ravines and of the water that comes from the earth. They become part of everything. They become the Soul of the World.

Don't think about what you've left behind. If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.

Each stone, each bend cries welcome to him. He identifies with the mountains and the streams, he sees something of his own soul in the plants and the animals and the birds of the field.

Believing that power is much more important than money and that money is much more important than happiness.

Retiring and discovering that you no longer have enough energy to enjoy life and dying a few years out of sheer boredom.

Making fun of anyone who seeks happiness rather than money and accusing them of "lacking ambition."

Working from nine till five every day at something that gives you no pleasure just so that, after thirty years, you can retire.