Quotes by Paulo Coelho

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"Writing means sharing. It's part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, opinions."

"I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: 'Oh my God, what a blessing.' Then you realise it's important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes."

"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."

"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."

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

"Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience."

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

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

"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."

"Beauty is the greatest seducer of man."

"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."

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

"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."

"Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age."

"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."

"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."

"Music for me, it demands full concentration."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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