Top 60 Paulo Coelho Quotes

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

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

Elegance is achieved when all that is superfluous has been discarded and the human being discovers simplicity and concentration: the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be.

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.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.

I am a Catholic, not so committed to the church, but to the idea of the Virgin, the female face of God.

Let us be absolutely clear about one thing: we must not confuse humility with false modesty or servility.

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

I never say I am a guru.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

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

I am a Catholic because I choose to be a Catholic. And then I go to the Mass because I choose. It is out of my free will.

There is an afterlife. I am convinced of this.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

I talk to my readers on social networking sites, but I never tell them what the book is about. Writing is lonely, so from time to time I talk to them on the Internet. It’s like chatting at a bar without leaving your office. I talk with them about a lot of things other than my books.

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.

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

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

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

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

Once I found this possibility to use Twitter and Facebook and my blog to connect to my readers, I’m going to use it, to connect to them and to share thoughts that I cannot use in the book.

The more in harmony with yourself you are, the more joyful you are and the more faithful you are. Faith is not to disconnect you from reality – it connects you to reality.

The gigantic tension before the shooting of an arrow, and the total relaxation seconds later, is my way of connecting to the universe.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

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.

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

I have been practicing archery for a long time; a bow and arrow helps me to unwind.

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

However happy people say they are, nobody is satisfied: we always have to be with the prettiest woman, buy a bigger house, change cars, desire what we do not have.

Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.

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.

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.

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

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

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.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

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

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

About the idea of a clash between cultures, between civilisations, I don’t believe in it. It’s something some political leaders tried to use, and that the media tried and are still trying to sell us, in order to simplify the world and their work.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

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

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.

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.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

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

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

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

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.

Things do not always happen the way I would like them to happen, and I had better get used to that.

Physical elegance, which is what I am talking about here, comes from the body. This is no superficial matter, but rather the way that man found to honour the way he places his two feet on the ground.

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

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

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.