Paulo Coelho

Impossible is just an opinion.

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

Burning logs can carry on quite a conversation! … Have you ever heard apple wood talking? It’s the most loquacious of all. You really can’t get a word in edgeways.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

Life is largely a matter of expectation.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.