Paulo Coelho Quotes

Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you're like me, you just keep chasing the storm.

We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you get it over with, the sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.

Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey,a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

I think everybody has their pain. For me, the time that I really had to grow up was when I was 15 and I had my best friend die of leukemia. Watching somebody so strong go through that is definitely something that will give you a little bit of depth. There have been a lot of things that have happened in my life that has forced me to grow up.

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before.

My great aunt raised me for about four or five years. Something I took from her was a quote: 'Fear of suffering is far worse than suffering itself.' I actually have that tattooed on the back of my arm.

My biggest fear as a fighter is to be knocked out in front of millions of people. But after it actually happened, there's this calmness about you that says everything is OK.

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.

The only thing tragedy gives us is the opportunity to rebuild our life.

In life, there's a lot that I'm afraid of. Death is always scary. My sister passed away. I'm not scared to die, so much as I was scared to not have her in my life, and it took a long time for me to reconcile that. There are fears everyday, and things that I'm afraid of. I fear everything, but I keep going.

In real life, bad things happen and they're not funny, and then bad things happen and they can be funny. When you're unhappy you don't go an entire time without laughing. You don't go your whole life without laughing. It's just life.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

when the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives-and we cannot prevent them-let us, too, accept the inevitable. And then get busy and pick up the pieces.

It's heartbreaking but we're trying to get over it. As disappointed as we were, I think that somehow you have to find a way to think that it happened for a reason.

If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble.

I try to show that I have no fear. When you grow up hungry, you're not afraid of anything.

I've had a tremendous problem with depression in my life. I'd rather not talk about it, because it's over. But depression is real.

I have no fear of death. More important, I don't fear life.

I never thought of having cancer as something that was unfair. I just braced myself and tried to get through it.

Recovery begins from the darkest moment.

The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage were born.

Madison Square Garden, November 1984. I don't recall taking too much fear into the ring. I knew I could fight. But I got a big shock. They put me in with this rough, tough veteran called Lionel Byarm. He tested me to the limit. But I fought my heart out and, in the end, I prevailed. The story of my life, in my very first fight.

Yes, I did shatter my leg, and it really changed my life, in a way. It wasn't much fun, but it did open me up, and as we all know intuitively, adversity can develop resources.