When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay.
Are you looking for the best of Paulo Coelho Quotes?
Paulo Coelho, a Brazilian novelist, mostly known for his novel, The Alchemist and Brida, through which he found space in the world of academia and literature. It might be exciting for you to find Coelho didn’t have a perfect childhood.
Born in an immensely conservative family, he had to suffer through his childhood for lack of understanding and empathy from his parents’ side even to attempt to apprehend his rebellious ways. (Well, the sad truth of life is that we all have been there and we know how it feels to in that particular spot)
His family found him extremely eccentric that they believed that their son was going crazy because he didn’t want to follow their footsteps. They considered his liberal and rebellious ideas and ways to be a symbol of madness that they admitted him to a psychiatric hospital to be treated where he fell prey to the terrors of shock therapy.
He wasn’t allowed much freedom even to choose his profession being the son of an engineer. People mocked and questioned him when told he wished to be a writer someday. Pressurized by his parents, he abandoned his lifelong dream of becoming a writer but instead enrolled himself in a law school.
Despite his constant endeavors to make his parents happy, he finally dropped out of the Law University, and bag packed around the world experiences, which later help him as a strives to become a writer. As he says, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” And the universe indeed helped him to become one of the best contemporary writers.
His most critically acclaimed book is The Alchemist, which sold millions of copies. It is considered as one of the most sold books worldwide. If you’ve not already read it, you should put it on the top of your reading list.
In this article, I will quote the best, and my personal favorite Paulo Coelho quotes from his wide range of works.
I hope you enjoy the Paulo Coelho quotes of all time.
Happy Reading!
1. “Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment helps us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken.”
– Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
2. “In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes in Paulo Coelho Quotes
3. “When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym in Paulo Coelho Quotes
4. “After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn’t bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it’s a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it’s sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we’re doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello in Paulo Coelho Quotes
5. “Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn’t have the courage to say “yes” to life?”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes in Paulo Coelho Quotes
6. “If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now? Then I will either wait for him or forget him.”
― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
7. “Tragedy always brings about a radical change in our lives, a change that is associated with the same principle: loss. When faced by any loss, there’s no point in trying to recover what has been; it’s best to take advantage of the large space that opens up before us and fill it with something new.”
– Paulo Coelho, Aleph in Paulo Coelho Quotes
8. “Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live, and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now. “I’m afraid of committing myself,” she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pan, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes not to see the bad things in life.”
– Paulo Coelho, Brida in Paulo Coelho Quotes
9. “But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if that means hours, days, weeks of disappointment, and sadness. The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us. And to save us.”
― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
10. “Ester asked why people are sad.
“That’s simple,” says the old man. “They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Zahir in Paulo Coelho Quotes
I don’t think I still have to request you guys to read Coelho after reading all these beautifully insightful quotes. But if still, someone needs a push go and start reading the Alchemist, and I promise you won’t be able to keep down the book down again until you’ve devoured every bit it has to offer you. And trust me, it does have a quite to offer and forces us to question the questions.
The quotes listed above are my favorite quotes, but they don’t have to be yours too. I would very much appreciate it if you would share your own all the favorite Paulo Coelho quotes, offering you advice on life, love, pain, suffering, and trauma.
Also, you’re free to comment if you liked our list of Paulo Coelho Quotes. And I hope you enjoyed reading it. Before I end this article, I have a Bonus quote for you, which is my absolute favorite out of all the Paulo Coelho Quotes how all human life is a journey which he exquisitely describes in three lines with magic and pixie dust.
The quote inspired me to embrace life as it comes to continuing this soulful journey each individual has to take. The quote goes like this, “We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.” (Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist in Paulo Coelho Quotes)
RELATED: Now, after reading some of the best Paulo Coelho quotes, you might be interested in learning and maybe also would like reading Coelho’s best work. Click here to check 10 Best Books of Paulo Coelho of all times.
