Paulo
Coelho’s a virtuoso! One of the greatest books that I've ever read. Actually,
this is the first time that I've read a Paulo Coelho novel and the time and
effort that I've exerted on reading this novel paid off – the book even
exceeded my expectations. I think the experiences and lessons given by this
book is priceless that no other book can give the same. It will make you see
the world in a different light. It shows perspective of a lonely, suffering,
struggling woman facing the challenges given by life and how those challenges molded her to become a brave and wise woman. And finally the ending scene was
just too perfect. I just can’t get enough. For that reason, I decided to make a
compilation of quotes I got from the book. Here it is:
“Everything tells me that I am about to make
a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just a part of life. What does the
world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back where I came
from because I didn’t have the courage to say yes to ‘life’?”
“If I must be faithful to someone or
something, then I have, first of all to be faithful to myself. If I’m looking
for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system. The
little experience of life I’d have had taught me that no one owns anything,
that everything is an illusion – and that applies to material as well as
spiritual things.”
“If I’ve learned one lesson from all that’s
happened to me, it’s that there is no such thing as biggest mistake of your
existence. There’s no such thing as ruining your life. Life’s a pretty
resilient thing, it turns out.”
“If I had fallen asleep and suddenly woken
up on a roller coaster, what would I feel? Well, I would feel trapped and sick,
terrified of every bend, wanting to get off. However, if I believe that the
track is my destiny and that God is in charge of the machine, then the
nightmare becomes something thrilling. It becomes exactly what it is, a
rollercoaster, a safe, reliable toy, which will eventually stop, but, while the
journey lasts, I must look at the surrounding landscape and whoop with
excitement.”
“Love was undoubtedly one of the things
capable of changing a person’s whole life, from one moment to the next. But
there was one side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being
take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that
was called despair. Yes, perhaps love could really transform someone, but
despair did the job more quickly.”
That’s what the world is like: people talk
as if they knew everything, but if you dare to ask a question, they don’t know
anything.
“We live in a vale of tears. We can have all
the dreams we like, but life is hard, implacable, and sad.”
“I’m not a body with a soul. I’m a soul that
has visible part called the body.”
“Eleven minutes. The world revolved around
something that only took eleven minutes.”
“Human beings can withstand a week without
water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness.
It is worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”
“All my life, I thought of love as some kind
of voluntary enslavement. Well, that’s a lie: freedom only exists when love is
present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels
freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly. And the person who loves
wholeheartedly feels free.”
That is the true experience of freedom:
having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
Considering the way the world is, one happy
day is almost a miracle.
“Love is not to be found in someone else,
but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the
other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our
feelings with.”
“Passion makes a person stop eating,
sleeping working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because,
when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.
No one wants their life thrown into chaos.
That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control…
Other people think exactly the opposite:
they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion
all the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible
for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are
either euphoric because something marvellous has happened or depressed because
something unexpected has just ruined everything. Keeping passion at bay or
surrendering blindly to it – which of these two attitudes is the least
destructive?”
“Instead
of buying something that you would like to have, I’m giving you something that
is mine. A gift. A sign of respect for the person before me, asking him to
understand how important it is to be by his side. Now he has a small part of me
with him, which I gave him with my free, spontaneous will.”
“I’m
teaching you because I’ve discovered something I didn’t know before. The giving
of gifts. Giving something of one’s own. Giving something important rather than
asking…
I
carry with me a part of your past, and you carry with you a little of my
present. Isn’t that lovely?”
Everyone
knows how to love, because we are all born with that gift.
“…no
one can know how to humiliate another person if they themselves have not
experienced humiliation.”
"…it
wasn’t necessary to find your own demons in order to find God."
“…it
isn’t necessary to know everything about ourselves; human beings weren’t made
solely to go in search of wisdom, but also to plough the land, wait for rain,
plant the wheat, harvest the grain, make the bread.”
“The
strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility. Anyway, if my
love is real, freedom will conquer jealousy and any pain it causes me, since
pain is also part of the natural process…”
“When
I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found
myself.”
The
further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we
try to repress and forget. If we’re in exile, we want to store away every tiny
memory of our roots. If we’re far from the person we love, everyone we pass in
the street reminds us of them.
“I
think that perhaps we always fall in love the very first instant we see the man
of our dreams, even though, at the time, reason may be telling us otherwise,
and we may fight against that instinct, hoping against hope that we won’t win,
until there comes a point when we allow ourselves to be vanquished by our
feelings…”
"We'll always have Paris." Ralf's most romantic line. <3
