Paulo Coelho Quotes

The greatest obstacle to discovering the truth is being convinced that you already know it.

People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

Nobody's easier to fool, than the person who is convinced that he is right.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.

Our capacity for belief is so plastic, we can convince ourselves of anything. Believing is seeing.

People readily believe what they want to believe.

Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.

How baffling it was that even the most cunning and clever people would frequently see only what they wanted to see, and would rarely look beyond the thinnest of facades. Or they would ignore reality, dismissing it as the facade. And then, when their whole world fell to pieces...they would tear their topknots or rend their clothes and bewail their karma, blaming gods or kami or luck or their lords or husbands or vassals-anything or anyone-but never themselves.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

I think people hear the question they want to hear.

But what if...what if you sincerely believed something was true, but you were dead wrong? What if you were so stubbornly sure that you were right, that you wouldn’t even consider the truth? Would the truth be silenced, or would it try to break through?

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

People see what they want to see when they need to.

You know people. Most of them don’t hear anything. Those who hear - don’t listen. A few who listen - don’t understand. And those who could understand… they don’t care.

Belief gets in the way of learning.

And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

Thinking you know something is a sure way to blind yourself.

You believe what you want to believe

The fact is that people would rather cling when they're afraid of something to a priori beliefs than rather open their minds about it.

We always have a tendency to see those things that do not exist and to be blind to the great lessons that are right there before our eyes.

I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.

We see what we want to believe.