Paulo Coelho Quotes

The dangers is that every religion, including the Catholic one, says "I have the ultimate truth." Then you start to rely on the priest, the mullah, the rabbi, or whoever, to be responsible for your acts. In fact, you are the only one who is responsible.

If I must be faithful to someone or something, I have, first of all, have to be faithful to myself.

I read the Bible and know little of its history, but the human beings who wrote it were instruments of Divine Power, and Jesus forged a far stronger bond than the ten commandments: love. Birds and monkeys, or any of God's creatures, obey their instincts and merely do what they're programmed to do. In the case of the human being, things are more complicated because we know about love and its traps.

Brazil is my way to see the world. Being born in that country means: "you don't have a wall separating the physical reality from the magical reality."

Don't give in to your fears. If you do, you won't be able to talk to your heart.

And because of our selfishness, we will be condemned to the worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: loneliness.

Investing a lot of time and money in external beauty and caring little about internal beauty.

All statutes to the contrary are revoked.

There are moments when troubles enter our lives and we can do nothing to avoid them.

All you have to do is to pay attention; lessons always arrive when you are ready, and if you can read the signs, you will learn everything you need to know in order to take the next step

I think that when we look for love courageously, it reveals itself, and we wind up attracting even more love. If one person really wants us, everyone does. But if we’re alone, we become even more alone. Life is strange.

The world we live in will be either better or worse depending on whether we become better or worse.

The same goes for envy, anger and insults - said the master. - When they are not accepted, they continue to belong to the one who carried them.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

During any dance to which we surrender with joy, the brain loses it's controlling power, and the heart takes up the reins of the body.

We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better.... or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do.... But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future only exist in our mind. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.... It isn't what you did in the past the will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.

We must struggle for our dreams, but when certain paths prove impossible, it would be best to save our energies in order to travel other roads.

They make a secret pact with themelves never to think about the future.

In real life, love has to be possible. Even if it is not returned right away, love can only survive when the hope exists that you will be able to win over the person you desire.

The journey towards the top of the mountain is always longer than you think. Don't fool yourself: the moment will come where what seemed to be close to you is in fact still very far away.

We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

The language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.

Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is.

The only faults considered grave are the following: not respecting the rights of one's neighbor, letting oneself be paralyzed by fear, feeling guilty, thinking one does not deserve the good and bad which occurs in life, and being a coward.

What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.

Love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.

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

If theater is ritual, then dance is too... It's as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.

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

I don't see any reason why I should look for someone who never took the trouble to love me.

We must never make our parents sad, even if this means giving up everything that makes us happy.

Live the life you always wanted to live. Avoid criticizing others and concentrate on fulfilling your dreams.

Every new book is a challenge. I could, of course, have stopped many years ago if it was only for money. But no, it is about building bridges among cultures, different cultures... When you want someone to understand something that is not forcefully in your culture, you use stories.

Love is the only thing that will save us, independent of any mistakes we may make. Love is always stronger.

If we seek something, that same thing is seeking us.

You might have lost some major battles, but you survived and you're still here.

It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

In our obsessive wish to arrive, we often forget the most important thing, which is the journey.

Don’t bother trying to explain your emotions. Live everything as intensely as you can and keep whatever you felt as a gift from God. The best way to destroy the bridge between the visible and invisible is by trying to explain your emotions.

The aim of every human being is to understand the meaning of total love.

I understand that everything is connected, that all roads meet, and that all rivers flow into the same sea.

The person who does not make a choice dies in the eyes of the Lord, even though he continues to breathe and to walk about the streets. For a man has to choose, therein lies his strength: in the power of his decisions.

Sometimes Evil pursues the Warrior of the Light, and when it does, he calmly invites it into his tent.

In Eleven Minutes, I started with the question of why sexuality is considered one of the major issues in life.

If everyone there just lived their lives and let others do the same, God would be in every moment, in every grain of mustard, in the fragment of cloud that is there and then gone the following moment. God was there and yet people believed they still had to go on looking, because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith.

Everything in your life can change except ONE: your passion

The world is divided into those who understand me and those who don’t. In the case of the latter, I simply leave them to torment themselves trying to gain my sympathy.

We don't always choose the best solution but we carry on regardless, trying to remain upright and decent in order to do honor not to the walls or the doors or the windows but to the empty space inside, the space where we worship and venerate what is dearest and most important to us.