Eleven Minutes Quotes

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