Paulo Coelho Quotes

You can't control your mind. Why would you want to?

The amount of stress in your life is determined by how much energy you expend resisting your life.

Stop resisting your problems so furiously in your mind. Stop struggling to solve them. If you do that, a great sense of peace followed by a great sense of power will come to you.

I've been angst-ridden all my life, but finally I'm in a place where things don't matter so much.

Meditation is the only way to freedom from stress as it is a dimension beyond the mind. All the stress and struggle are of the mind.

The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.

Acceptance is the key to be truly free.

And that works for me. So that if this is it, you better take it at its right proportion. That there are serious things, but most things are temporal and ephemeral, and you should cultivate that attitude. That joy and love and all the verities are what counts. So I try not to take too many things seriously, and if I find myself caught up in the seriousness of the moment, within a period of time, I'm able to cajole myself out of it.

I don't have to be perfect. All I have to do is show up and enjoy the messy, imperfect and beautiful journey of my life.

Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

You don't have to control your thoughts; you just have to stop letting them control you.

Letting go is not the same as aversion, struggling to get rid of something. We cannot genuinely let go of what we resist. What we resist and fear secretly follows us even as we push it away. To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be.

The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want.

When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?

If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.

Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You're here. It's our time and our life, not theirs. Don't struggle not to be happy. You are." - John Gault

We can't escape from the world anymore; we can't escape from the mind. We need to enter surrender while we are in the world. That seems to be the path that is effective in the world that we live in now.

I don't ever feel the need to escape.

The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

All I want is to live a peaceful life, to regain my life and be happy.

Enjoy doing nothing, and you can enjoy doing anything. Enjoy having nothing, and you can enjoy whatever you have.

Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it.