Paulo Coelho Quotes

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

I felt my whole life was a facsimile of a life.

I'm an actor, so I think without a character to play, a story to tell, a song to sing... there's some suspicion that there's no 'there' there. Like, if I were to just strip down and present myself, I think I'd sort of just... disappear.

Life is an empty dream.

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

I was jumping rope. Everything was fine. And then suddenly everything seemed so futile.

Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?

But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning

You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff? That's just not enough. Look at us all. What's the common assumption that got us all from there to here? What makes us deserve the ice cream and running shoes and wool Italian suits we have? I mean, I see all of us trying so hard to acquire so much stuff, but I can't help but feeling that we didn't merit it.

A life of nothing's nothing worth, From that first nothing ere his birth, To that last nothing under earth.

But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake.

Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty.

Who am I, why am I here? Forget the question, someone give me another beer.

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples, some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

If you see there is no meaning to anything that you are doing, your ego collapses; so you are trying to find all kinds of fake meanings.

People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live for.

Nobody wants to have meaninglessness in their lives. You probably see a lot of people living their lives that don't have a whole lot of meaning that you can perceive, and you don't want that for yourself.

Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, words!

Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things

Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?

Hell's waking up every goddamn day and not even knowing why you're here.