Paulo Coelho Quotes

You learn as you grow up, if you're intelligent - or even three-quarter witted - that there's no free lunch. You pay for things in various ways. Living, loving, everything else is a matter of the same principles: you learn to work with what you have.

That's one of the biggest things. Never being home, always traveling, having different interests and focusing on different things, just the time aspect of going back home and seeing them, you don't have that at all. It was a big sacrifice but, at the end of the day, it was worth it.

You can't throw away years of your life because it makes a funny anecdote.

Don't lie - when you are 105 years of age - on your deathbed, thinking, 'I should have done a few things!' I would like to think I tried as much as I could.

It's pathetic to have regrets about fashion. Things to do with my life, yes, I have regrets there.

I think it's natural as you get to the end of your twenties to start thinking about what you could have done differently - whether they went well or whether they went terribly.

I think the only advice I can give you on how to live your life well is, first off, remember... it's not the things we do in life that we regret on our deathbed, it is the things we do not.

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality.

You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult.

By definition, an actor's life is a recipe for regret. There are always roads you could have taken. But I've lived long enough to realise that each road has its own rewards.

Do I regret how my life turned out? Of course not - not for a single second.

When I am older, I don't want to look at my films and not be happy about my choices.

When suddenly your focus changes, you see the years going by and it's an extra reminder that you don't want to live life with any regrets.

Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.

You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.

I always figure from the cradle to the grave, we all have our individual journeys, and maybe my journey was a positive one and I accomplished certain things without stepping on too many toes.

As we grow older I always think, why didn't I do more when I was young, why didn't I risk more?

To achieve important things, we have to sacrifice what's important to us. That's an idea that's very central to Indian thinking.

They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.

But the path you end up on means that you have to close a lot of doors, too.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Life is a matter of really tough choices.

Knowing what I know now and what I have been through, would I do it the same? I look at the alternative - a very simple life. It would have been nice to have a simple life.

I think we should all live the moment. But you also have to think ahead. You have to think, 'Am I going to be happy with this five, ten years from now? Is it going to let me evolve and grow, or am I going to grow to one day wish I had never done it?' Sometimes you just have to think a little bit ahead.

If I had to do it over, I wouldn't change a thing.