“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, quote from Eleven Minutes
“When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“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, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.
Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion 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 marvelous 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?
I don't know.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“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, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or--such is the pleasure they experience--they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“I’ve learned that waiting is the most difficult bit, and I want to get used to the feeling, knowing that you’re with me, even when you’re not by my side.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I'm a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body and doing battle with each other.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“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.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Don't listen to the malicious comments of those friends who, never taking any risks themselves, can only see other people's failures.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.
Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meetings are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes direction.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“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.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“I’ve met a man and fallen in love with him. I allowed myself to fall in love for one simple reason: I’m not expecting anything to come of it. I know that, in three months’ time, I’ll be far away and he’ll be just a memory, but I couldn’t stand living without love any longer; I had reached my limit…
Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meeting are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes directions.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“but something always went wrong, and the relationship would end precisely at the moment when she was sure that this was the person with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. After a long time, she came to the conclusion that men brought only pain, frustration, suffering and a sense of time dragging.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“I'm not a body with a soul, I'm a soul that has a visible part called the body.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“...and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“اما اليوم , فأنا مقتنعة بأن لا أحد يفقد أحدآ , لانه لا أحد يفقد أحدآ , لانه لا أحد يمتلك أحدآ . هذه هى التجربة الحقيقة للحرية”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“الحب ليس فى الأخر . أنه موجود داخلنا , ونحن من نوقظه من غفوته . لكننا , ولكي نوقظه , نحتاج الى الأخر . ليس للكون من معنى لحين يكون لدينا أحد يشاطرنا انفعالاتنا”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Sometimes life is very mean: a person can spend days, weeks, months and years without feeling new. Then, when a door opens - a positive avalanche pours in. One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
“You can either be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It all depends on how you view your life.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Eleven Minutes
Paulo Coelho
Born place: in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
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“A successful novel should erase the boundary line between writer and reader, so they can unite. When that happens, the novel becomes a part of life—the main course, not the dessert. A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments,”
― William Golding, quote from The Inheritors
“For a detective or street police, the only real satisfaction is the work itself; when a cop spends more and more time getting aggravated with the details, he's finished. The attitude of co-workers, the indifference of superiors, the poor quality of the equipment - all of it pales if you still love the job; all of it matters if you don't.”
― David Simon, quote from Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
“Here is the crux of the strategy: Instead of hiring an expert, or spending a lot of time trying to decide which stocks or actively managed funds are likely to be top performers, just invest in index funds and forget about it!”
― quote from The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing
“My name is Case. Philodendron Case. Thanks to my Ma. I’ve never even told Raven about that. That’s why I joined the army. To get away from the kind of potato diggers that would stick a name like that on a kid. I had seven sisters and four brothers last time I got a head count. Every one is named after some damned flower. A girl named Iris or Rose, what the hell, hey? But I got a brother named Violet and another brother named Petunia. What kind of people do that do their kids? Where the hell are the Butches and Spikes? Potato diggers.”
― Glen Cook, quote from The Books of the South
“Whoever believes physical size and tests of speed or strength have anything to do with a soccer player's prowess is sorely mistaken. Just as mistaken as those who believe that IQ tests have anything to do with talent or that there is a relationship between penis size and sexual pleasure. Good soccer players need not to be titans sculpted by Michelangelo. In soccer, ability is much more important than shape, and in many cases skill is the art of turning limitations into virtues.”
― Eduardo Galeano, quote from Soccer in Sun and Shadow
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The Garden of The Pr...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
