Paulo Coelho Quotes

If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.

The psychology of brutality was worse than the beatings.

Such persons are windows through which one looks into terrible worlds.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure

Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.

The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

Now it is nothing but torture.

Explanations don't comfort. You won't feel better if you know why. It won't hurt any less.

What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation.

We become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn't.

I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable... Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worse possible thing.

Hope hurt more than the cold.

Surviving is much more painful than death.

The body knows no pain, not like the soul. At least a nerve has limits, a body part a name. But the soul... the soul... There is no bandage - even crying is in vain.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

There might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death.