“The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Be crazy! But learn how to be crazy without being the center of attention. Be brave enough to live different.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“You are someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious illness. God chose you to be different. Why are you disappointing God with this kind of attitude?”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“You have two choices, to control your mind or to let your mind control you.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Haven't you learned anything, not even with the approach of death? Stop thinking all the time that you're in the way, that you're bothering the person next to you. If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have the courage to complain, that's their problem”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“If one day I could get out of here, I would allow myself to be crazy. Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they're crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Nothing in this world happens by chance”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“I want to continue being crazy; living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people want it to be.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“She didn't quite know what the relationship was between lunatics and the moon, but it must be a strong one, if they used a word like that to describe the insane.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Collective madness is called sanity ..”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Once upon a time, powerful wizard, who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go mad.
The following morning, the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone, which the magician had not managed to poison. The king was worried and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health. The policemen and the inspectors, however, had also drunk the poisoned water, and they thought the king’s decisions were absurd and resolved to take notice of them.
When the inhabitants of the kingdom heard these decrees, they became convinced that the king had gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. The marched on the castle and called for his abdication.
In despair the king prepared to step down from the throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: ‘Let us go and drink from the communal well. Then we will be the same as them.’
And that was what they did: The king and queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the king was displaying such ‘wisdom’, why not allow him to rule the country?
The country continued to live in peace, although its inhabitants behaved very differently from those of its neighbors. And the king was able to govern until the end of his days.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“She would consider each day a miracle - which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Nothing in this world happens by chance.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Anyone who lives in her own world is crazy. Like schizophrenics, psychopaths, maniacs. I mean people who are different from others.'
Like you?'
On the other hand,' Zedka continued, pretending not to have heard the remark, 'you have Einstein, saying that there was no time or space, just a combination of the two. Or Columbus, insisting that on the other side of the world lay not an abyss but a continent. Or Edmund Hillary, convinced that a man could reach the top of Everest. Or the Beatles, who created an entirely different sort of music and dressed like people from another time. Those people--and thousands of others--all lived in their own world.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“This time I m not going to tell you a story. I'll just say that insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Death frees from the fear of dying”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Many people don't allow themselves to love...because there are a lot of things at risk a lot of future and a lot of past.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“If only everyone could know and live with their inner craziness. Would the world be a worse place for it? No, people would be fairer and happier.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“I wanted to...feel hatred and love, despair and tedium-- all those simple, yet foolish things that make up everyday life but that give pleasure to your existence. If one day I could get out of here, I would allow myself to be crazy, Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they are crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“The danger of an adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“كانت متعالية على الأشياء الصغيره وكأنها تحاول أن تثبت لنفسها كم هى قوية وغير مكترثة فى حين كانت فى الواقع امرأه هشة”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“We all live in our own world. But if you look up at the starry sky - you'll see that all the different worlds up there combine to form constellations, solar systems, galaxies.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Hatred. Something almost as physical as walls, pianos, or nurses. She could almost touch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of masks, of appropriate behavior. Veronika wanted to spend her remaining two or three days of life behaving as inappropriately as she could.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“The happier people can be, the unhappier they are.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Personal growth has its price, and she was paying it without complaint.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“Life is always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
“She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors--white, black, yellow--with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone's, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before, and she gave herself to all that was most base and most pure.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Veronika Decides to Die
Paulo Coelho
Born place: in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
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“Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. “Yes . . . and” rather than “No . . . but.” “The idiot is bound by his pride,” he says. “It always has to be his way. This is also true of the person who is deceptive or doing things wrong: he always tries to justify himself. A person who is bright in regard to his spiritual life is humble. He accepts what others tell him—criticism, ideas—and he works with them.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
“Charles arrived around eight a.m. with a squadron of Drabants and began riding along the bank at the water’s edge to inspect the men and their positions. Some of the Russians from the force which had been driven back remained on one of the numerous islands in midstream, and they began to fire at the party of Swedish officers across the water. The musket range was short and a Drabant was shot dead in his saddle. Charles, without the slightest care for his own safety, continued his slow ride at the water’s edge. Then, his inspection finished, he turned his horse to ride back up the bank. His back was to the enemy, and at that moment he was hit in the left foot by a Russian musket ball. The ball struck his heel, piercing the boot, plunging forward through the length of the foot, smashing a bone and finally passing out near the big toe. Count Stanislaus Poniatowski, a Polish nobleman accredited to Charles XII by King Stanislaus, who was riding next to the King, noticed that he was hurt, but Charles commanded him to keep quiet. Although the wound must have been excruciatingly painful, the King continued his tour of inspection as if nothing had happened. It was not until eleven a.m., almost three hours after being hit, that he returned to his headquarters and prepared to dismount. By this time, the officers and men near him had noticed his extreme pallor and the blood dripping from his torn left boot. Charles tried to dismount but the movement caused such agony that he fainted. By”
― Robert K. Massie, quote from Peter the Great: His Life and World
“I couldn't help myself from falling in love with this woman. When she took my hand, I willingly gave her my whole life.”
― Georgia Cates, quote from Beauty from Love
“It was warm, and outside the sound of insects in the night was electric.
The music sounded better than anything I'd ever heard.
I had never been so happy in my life.
I played with the little silver medal against my bare chest.
I wrote poetry while we sat there like that in the dark and talked about our favorite poems and books and laughed and smoked.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Forget about time, Merit. Look at him and tell me you haven’t fallen in love with him.”
I sigh. Fallen is an understatement. It was more like collapsed. Plummeted. Crumpled at his feet. Anything but fallen”
― Colleen Hoover, quote from Without Merit
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Attrition: the First...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.
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