Paulo Coelho Quotes

But life is a great school. It thrashes and bangs and teaches you.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

When life hits you hard, it can throw you off course. But how you handle that adversity can teach you so much about yourself and change your perspective on what you actually want from life.

Affliction comes to us all, not to make us sad, but sober; not to make us sorry, but to make us wise; not to make us despondent, but by its darkness to refresh us as the night refreshes the day; not to impoverish, but to enrich us

It is written that adversity introduces us to ourselves.

Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought.

Someone once said, 'Adversity introduces a man to himself.' For some reason, that's scary, but most people discover that adversity does make them stronger.

Through my handicaps, I have found my self, my work, my God.

Adversity builds character and character takes you places money can't.

Everybody has difficult years, but a lot of times the difficult years end up being the greatest years of your whole entire life, if you survive them.

Although it may seem like it, life will never give you more than you can handle. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy; in fact, quite the opposite.

I guess that one of the most important things I've learned is that nothing is ever completely bad. Even cancer. It has made me a better person. It has given me courage and a sense of purpose I never had before. But you don't have to do like I did...wait until you lose a leg or get some awful disease, before you take the time to find out what kind of stuff you're really made of. You can start now. Anybody can.

Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time

I don't see life as an opportunity to see how far you can go in the pursuit of pain, although I think I've challenged it a bit.

Trouble teaches men how much there is in manhood.

Through difficult experiences, life sometimes becomes more meaningful.

If you truly want to grow as a person and learn, you should realize that the universe has enrolled you in the graduate program of life, called loss.

A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.

Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think ofhimself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches him this.

It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.

God already knows what we're made of, but perhaps He wants us to learn what we're made of. I think we would all agree that we learn more from our tough times than from our easy times.

I knew that I had it tough compared to children around me. But I felt like I needed it. I think I had the wisdom as a child to know that it would help me later on.

All my life, since the time I was little, has been a long distraction. At least that is the way some people want to perceive it, but for me, it's given me a lot of strength.

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

Life is not linear; you have ups and downs. It's how you deal with the troughs that defines you.