ThE WiSdOm oF PaoLo CoeLhO

These quotes were lifted from the great works of Paulo Coelho, one of the most influential and inspirational writers of our time. I hope they inspire you as they have inspired me.

• “I learned the most important lesson of my life: that the extraordinary is not the birthright of a chosen and privileged few, but of all people, even the humblest. That is my one certainty: we are all the manifestation of the divinity of God.” - from Confessions of a Pilgrim
• “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” - from The Alchemist
• “A fall from the third floor hurts as much as a fall from the hundredth. If I have to fall, may it be from a high place.” - from By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
• "But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting."
• "We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen."
• "Everyday, God gives us the sun - and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything."
• "If you start by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work towards, getting it."
• "You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It's just a matter of paying attention to this miracle."
• "Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own." - from The Alchemist
• "No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it." - from The Alchemist
• "Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity." - from The Alchemist
• "It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting." - from The Alchemist
• "Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. You've got to find the treasure, so that everything you have learned along the way can make sense." - from The Alchemist
• "There is only one way to learn," the alchemist answered. "It's through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey." - from The Alchemist
• "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." - from The Alchemist
• "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. Tragedies do happen. We can discover the reason, blame others, imagine how different our lives would be had they not occurred. But none of that is important: they did occur, and so be it. From there onward we must put aside the fear that they awoke in us and begin to rebuild." - from The Fifth Mountain
• “We have to listen to the child we once were, the child who still exists inside us. That child understands magic moments. We can stifle its cries, but we cannot silence its voice. The child we once were is still there. Blessed are the children, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. If we are not reborn – if we cannot learn to look at life with the innocence and the enthusiasm of childhood – it makes no sense to go on living." - from By The River Piedra I Sat Down And Wept
• "We are all warriors of light fighting for our dreams."
• "To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God." - from By The River Piedra I Sat Down And Wept
• "Be like the fountain that overflows, not merely the cistern that contains..." - from Veronica Decides To Die
• "If everyone 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." - from Veronica Decides To Die