Paulo Coelho

So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.

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

Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.

Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.

It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn.

Tears are words that need to be written.

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

Life attracts life.

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.

This is what we call love. When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you.

People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.

A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.

Trust and start walking. We are not alone in the dark, our path will unfold as we move.

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 for.

Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life.

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule – never lie to yourself.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset - tears are words waiting to be written.

It took me 40 years to write my first book.

Do not seek to be loved at any price, because Love has no price.

If you only walk on sunny days you'll never reach your destination.

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.

Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly

Emotions are wild horses. It is not explanations that carry us forward, but our will to go on.

Close some doors today. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they lead you nowhere.

Don’t explain. Your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you.

To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life.

Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.

Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.

When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.

The secret of life is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.

The act of discovering  who we are will force us to accept that we can go further than we think.

One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.

What is success? It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace.

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

One of many ways to be useful is to inspire people to forget some rules imposed by society. Important rules are dictated by our hearts.

You start living for the obsession alone… You want to arrive somewhere regardless of whether you’re enjoying the road or not.

To realize one’s personal legend is one’s only true obligation.

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.

You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his personal legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t a true love… The love that speaks the language of the world.

An enthusiastic heart finds opportunities everywhere.

Start using your wings; they need some exercise.

It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.

Dreams are the language of God.

Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.

The enemy is only a pretext to test our strength.

I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life.

You have two choices: to control your mind or to let your mind control you.

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.

If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal.

If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.

You are your own best friend. Never ever, put yourself down.

Never give up. When your heart becomes tired, just walk with your legs - but move on.

Fight for your dreams, and your dreams will fight for you.

No one can hit their target with their eyes closed.

There are moments when people are incapable of understanding happiness.

Life really is generous to those who pursue their destiny.

No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

Life takes us by surprise and orders us to move toward the unknown - even when we don’t want to and when we think we don’t need to.

Laugh at your worries and insecurities. View your anxieties with humor. It will be difficult at first, but you’ll gradually get used to it.

Pain, loss and separation are inevitable on the path of love, and the only way of avoiding them is by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you have to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.

When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

When you repeat a mistake, it is not a mistake anymore: it is a decision.

At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.

Life has a way of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen at once.

When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.

Hold the hand of the child within you. For this child, nothing is impossible.

The best way to be original is to be yourself.

Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there.

Everything is possible, from angels to demons, to economists and politicians.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.

Everybody has a creative potential, and from the moment you can express this creative potential you can start changing the world.

Love is a trap. When it appears we see only its light, not its shadows.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don't hurt me because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

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.

Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?

I think you can have 10 000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer, because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

When a person really desires something all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.

If you start by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work towards getting it.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

I'm not saying that love always takes you to heaven. Your life can become a nightmare. But that said, it is worth taking the risk.

I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Of course, to have money is just great because you can do what you think is important to you. I always was a rich person because money's not related to happiness.

Music, for me, it demands full concentration.

Everything for me is sacred, beginning with earth, but also going to things made by man.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose - and commit myself to - what is best for me.

Each time we embrace someone warmly, we gain an extra day of life.

Life is a journey. How we travel is really up to us.  We can just flow with the tide or follow our own dreams.

Be fully awake if you want to dream

Miracles only happen if you believe in miracles.

Don't give to anyone the power to put you down. Haters are losers pretending to be winners.

Love is what makes you smile when you're tired.

The best way to serve God is by going in search of your own dreams. Only the happy can spread happiness.

Don’t allow your wounds to transform you into someone you are not.

Accumulating love brings luck, accumulating hatred brings calamity.

There are neither winners nor losers; there are only stages that must be gone through. When the human heart understands this, it is free and able to accept difficult times without being deceived by moments of glory.

They were seeking out the treasure of their destiny, without actually wanting to live out their destiny.

God is love, generosity and forgiveness; If we believe in this, we will never allow our weaknesses to paralyze us.

The moment of that kiss contained every happy moment I had ever lived.

All battles in life serve to teach us something, even the battles we lose.

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.

Lovers need to know how to lose themselves and then how to find themselves again.

The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.

A brush with death always helps us to live our lives better.

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.

Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.

Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.

When someone leaves, it’s because someone else is about to arrive.

The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us. And to save us.

It takes huge effort to free yourself from memory.

If you want to see a rainbow you have to learn to see the rain.

People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same.

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

Don’t waste your time with explanations, people only hear what they want to hear.

When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It's very simple.

There is an afterlife. I am convinced of this.

Most of my young years were spent under the boots of the military.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

When you want something all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

Twitter is my bar. I sit at the counter and listen to the conversations, starting others, feeling the atmosphere.

I hate to be smart.

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

Today writers want to impress other writers.

I've done everything I wanted to do, even if I have had to pay a very high price - which has been the case most of the time.

I don't go to parties in general.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

People are very reluctant to talk about their private lives, but then you go to the internet and they're much more open.

In the United States I am a great success, but I am not a celebrity.

I never say I am a guru.

I'm not a person that socializes very well.

Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

I'm modern because I make the difficult seem easy and so I can communicate with the whole world.

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

The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip, to avoid this the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae recipes or other people's opinions.

Beauty is the greatest seducer of man.

I don't try to control my days.

The good old days when each idea had an owner are gone forever.

We want to answer this classical question 'who am I'? So I think that most of our works are for art or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.

All women have a perception much more developed than men. So all women somehow being repressed for so many millennia, they ended up by developing this sixth sense, and contemplation, and love. And this is something that we have a hard time to accept as part of our society.

We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.

It's very difficult to read a book on your computer.

My readers - and I get 400 emails for a day - my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer you do understand me also. We are in the same level.