Paulo Coelho Quotes

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

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

As I don't know about tomorrow, I never save the best for later.

Listen to your heart. It knows everything.

You cannot trust a person until you know where and how he lives

... keep practicing. After a great deal of practice, we no longer think about all the necessary movements we must make; they become part of our existence. Before reaching that stage, however, you must practice and repeat. And if that's not enough, you must practice and repeat some more.

Treat every challenge as a lesson, every mistake you make as a blessing and move on.

Face your path with courage, don't be scared of people's criticism. And, above all, don't let yourself get paralyzed by your own criticism.

Playing the part of a charitable soul was only for those who were afraid of taking a stand in life. It is always far easier to have faith in your own goodness than to confront others and fight for your rights. It is always easier to hear an insult and not retaliate than have the courage to fight back against someone stronger than yourself; we can always say we're not hurt by the stones others throw at us, and it's only at night - when we're alone and our wife or our husband or our school friend is asleep - that we can silently grieve over our own cowardice.

The Warrior sometimes fights with those he loves.

I am going to sit here in the river. If you go home to sleep, I will sleep in front of your house. And if you go away, I will follow you - until you tell me to go away. Then I'll leave. But I have to love you for the rest of my life.

A warrior accepts defeat. He does not treat it as a matter of indifference, nor does he attempt to transform it into a victory. The pain of defeat is bitter to him; he suffers at indifference and becomes desperate with loneliness. After all this has passed, he licks his wounds and begins everything anew. A warrior knows that war is made of many battles: he goes on

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

You should paint those visions of paradise rather than just talking about them.

Tell your story: yes, tell your story! Give your example. Tell everyone that it's possible, and other people will then have the courage to face their own mountains.

Sometimes I need to be a stranger to myself. Only then my soul can show me not what I want, but what I need to see.

Being afraid of having an endoscopy (if you're a man) and giving birth (if you're a woman).

Everything is a matter of courage.

Sometimes life is very mean: a person can spend days, weeks, months and years without feeling new. Then, when a door opens - a positive avalanche pours in. One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with.

To me, a witch is a woman that is capable of letting her intuition take hold of her actions, that communes with her environment, that isn't afraid of facing challenges.

If there is any possible consolation in the tragedy of losing someone we love very much, it's the necessary hope that perhaps it was for the best.

May we understand that fear of failure is worse than failure itself

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. "Once upon a time" is how all the best children's stories begin, and "prostitute" is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let's keep that beginning.

When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.

The music could even penetrate his remote world, more distant than the moon itself; it could even perform miracles.

A Warrior knows that everything a person does has enduring consequences.

Negative desires can cause no evil if you do not allow yourself to be seduced by them.

The only power you have on this planet is the power of your decisions.

You're a man who has suffered and wants revenge,' she said. 'Your heart is dead, your soul is in darkness. The devil by your side is smiling because you are playing the game he invented.

The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change: Yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.

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.

Whenever a religion tightens it's rules, a significant number of people break away and go in search of more freedom in their search for spiritual contact.

Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away

We must love because we are loved by God. We must be conscious of death if we are to have a proper understanding of life. We must struggle in order to grow, but without falling into the trap of the power we gain through that struggle, because we know that power is worthless. Finally, we must accept that our eternal soul is, at this moment, caught in the web of time with all its opportunities and its limitations.

We always have a tendency to see those things that do not exist and to be blind to the great lessons that are right there before our eyes.

Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person's life its true meaning.

Fortunate are those who take the first step. Someday people will realize that men and women are capable of speaking the language of the angels - that all of us are possessed of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and that we can perform miracles, cure, prophesy, and understand.

I want to continue being crazy; living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people want it to be.

A Warrior knows that a great dream is made up of many different things, just as the light from the sun is the sum of its millions of rays.

Not knowing whether to wait or to forget is the worst kind of suffering.

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

But he knows that no man is an island.

People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life but choose instead to be a part of it.

The Warrior of the Light concentrates on the small miracles of daily life.

When God wants to drive a person insane, he grants that person's every wish.

The desert takes our dreams away from us, and they don't always return.

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

Remember that when you truly want something, the entire Universe conspires to make it happen.