Paulo Coelho Quotes

With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose.

We can spend our days bemoaning our losses, or we can grow from them. Ultimately the choice is ours. We can be victims of circumstance or masters of our own fate, but make no mistake, we cannot be both. The Walk - Epilogue Page 288

I don't fear challenge.

The next time you encounter a difficult obstacle or problem, you should smile and say, 'Here's my chance to grow.'

It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.

It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Above all, don't fear difficult moments. The best comes from them.

Have the courage to face a difficulty lest it kick you harder than you bargain for.

Some struggle is healthy. If you can embrace it rather than be angry, you can use it as your pilot light.

As with the butterfly, adversity is necessary to build character in people.

In my life, I think I have had more than two hundred significant breakthroughs that exponentially accelerated my life forward. However, each and every one of them was preceded by a breakdown that was not pretty, was often scary, and often felt like something I would not get past.

Failure is ultimately very liberating. Once you come out the other side of it, you just might have faced one of your biggest fears and lived. The other side of failure is a big elimination of fear of failure. Trust me, that is an amazing gift.

If something is going on and you are struggling, embrace it. You are growing.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

The most important factor in determining whether you will succeed isn’t your gender, it’s you. Be open to opportunity and take risks. In fact, take the worst, the messiest, the most challenging assignment you can find, and then take control.

Something horrible may have happened to you, but you always have a choice in how you respond to it. You have the "Why does bad stuff always happen to me? I'm never going to find happiness" option, and the "This sucks but I'm going to learn and evolve from it, examine what role I played in it, and ultimately it will help me become the person I'm supposed to be" option.

If you become a master of meaning, you become a master of your life. Two people can have the same experience. One person decides that because of that experience his or her life is over, while the other decides that God has challenged him or her to step up, face the challenge, and become more than he or she ever was before.

When adversity hits, go out and learn something.

It's core to my beliefs now: Sometimes in being given a challenge, you're actually being given a real opportunity, and a lot of that is how you handle it. Do you feel sorry for yourself or do you think, All right! I'll see what I can make out of this? I've had that over and over. If I hang out in the disappointment, I'll just be disappointed all the time.

It is those very things that we are most afraid to do that provide the greatest liberation and growth for us.

When you reach an obstacle, turn it into an opportunity. You have the choice.

It’s a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world. So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave – let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we’re faking them. And whatever happens to us, whatever we make, whatever we learn, let us take joy in it. We can find joy in the world if it’s joy we’re looking for, we can take joy in the act of creation. So that is my wish for you, and for me. Bravery and joy.

Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life, and when it comes, hold your head high, look it quarely in the eye and say, 'I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.

Those times in life when you're terrified are the mastery times.