Quotes by Paulo Coelho

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

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

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

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

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.

With every day that passed, the boys 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.

I could have.What does this phrase mean? At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have heppened but, didnt. The magic moments go unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.

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.

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

This was the kiss I had waited for so long - a kiss born by the river of our childhood, when we didnt 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.

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 . . .

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.

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

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

Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I dont want to do so.

If you start out by promising what you dont even have yet, youll lose your desire to work toward getting it.

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

Making a decision is only the beginning of things

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

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