Paulo Coelho Quotes

Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

When you get older, it's not about what you did that you regret, it's what you didn't do.

The chance you passed up or missed could have had any number of different outcomes, and it's easy to fantasize about how much better every one of those outcomes would have been.

Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced - because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.

I do feel I have all the qualities of a film star but then why didn't I make it that big? I blame it on my destiny. I was not there at the right place at the right time.

Was there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was ― a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once while she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else.

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.

One of the worst things you can die with is potential.

Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward--that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.

That man made me miss my destiny.

I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate.

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.

...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.

If the past year were offered me again, And choice of good and ill before me set Would I accept the pleasure with the pain Or dare to wish that we had never met?

But to deny fate is arrogance, to declare that we are the sole shapers of our existence is madness;if you deny fate life becomes the series of missed opportunities, a regret for what never was and could have been, a remorse of what was not done and could have been done, and the present is wasted, twisted into another missed oppurtunity.

The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.

Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options

So little of what could happen does happen.

To be born means being compelled to choose an era, a place, a life. To exist here, now, means to lost the possibility of being countless other potential selves.. Yet once being born there is no turning back. And I think that's exactly why the fantasy worlds of cartoon movies so strongly represent our hopes and yearnings. They illustrate a world of lost possibilities for us.

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.