Close some doors. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they no longer lead somewhere.
Paulo Coelho
I've been in love before, it's like a narcotic. At first it brings the euphoria of complete surrender. The next day you want more. You're not addicted yet, but you like the sensation, and you think you can still control things.You think about the person you love for two minutes then forget them for three hours. But then you get used to that person, and you begin to be completely dependent on them. Now you think about him for three hours and forget him for two minutes. If he's not there, you feel like an addict who can't get a fix. And just as addicts steal and humiliate themselves to get what they need, you're willing to do anything for love.
Paulo Coelho
Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.
Paulo Coelho
One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
You don’t have to explain your dreams, they belong to you.
Paulo Coelho
We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.
Paulo Coelho
There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Don't allow your wounds to transform you into someone you're not.
Paulo Coelho, Aleph
Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?
Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
You have two choices, to control your mind or to let your mind control you. You're already familiar with the latter experience, allowing yourself to be swept along your fears, neuroses, insecurity, for we all have self-destructive tendencies.
Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn't care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.
Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
After all, we are human beings, we are born full of guilt, we feel terrified when happiness becomes a real possibility; and we die wanting to punish everyone else because we feel impotent, ill-used, and unhappy.
Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes)