Quotes from Paulo Coelho

The power of beauty: what must the world be like for ugly women?

The world has never been as divided as it is now.

Life is like a garden, you reap what you sow

The best way to prepare for a challenge is to cultivate the ability to call on an infinite variety of responses.

When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a story current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

It's a force that appears to be negative, but actually shows you how to realize your Personal Legend. It prepares your spirit and your will, because there is one great truth on this planet: whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth.

Never stop having doubts. If you ever do, it will be because you've stopped moving forward, and at that point, God will step in and pull the rug out from under your feet, because that is His way of controlling His chosen ones, by making sure they always follow their appointed path to the end. If, for any reason, we stop, whether out of complacency, laziness, or out of a mistaken belief that we know enough, He forces us on.

The problem is that they don't even realize that they're walking a new road every day. They don't see that the fields are new and the seasons change. All they think about is food and water

But the great wisdom of life is to realize that we can be the masters of the things that try to enslave us

See, it's not that I'm jealous of others. I just don't understand why they can be happy and I can't.

Until one day when, as well as his spiritual death, physical death appears; at that moment God will ask: what did you do with your life? We must all answer this question, and woe betides those who answer: I remained standing at the door.

Firstly, by learning the great lesson of wise men: patience, the certainty that everything - both good and bad - is provisional in this life. Secondly, using this sudden change of course to risk new things in daily life, to do things you always dreamed of.