Paulo Coelho Quotes

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt. That's morality, that's religion, that's art, that's life.

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.

Man - a being in search of meaning.

Every character is asking: 'What's my place? Why am I here? I don't want the answer to be 'Just because.' You find your own purpose. Each finds the reason to be here and how to contribute.

I am a collection of thoughts and memories and likes and dislikes. I am the things that have happened to me and the sum of everything I've ever done. I am the clothes I wear on my back. I am every place and every person and every object I have ever come across. I am a bag of bones stuck to a very large rock spinning a thousand miles an hour.

From ancient times, the core idea of the soul is the soul is the capacity to integrate different functions into a single being or into a single person. The soul is what holds us all together: what connects our will and our minds and our bodies and connects us to God.

The teenage years are the years to examine faith - the need to be independent and the need to be anchored. Who made all this? And what do I have to do with it?

Who are we? The answer to this question is not only one of the tasks but the task of science.

Every good story is about who we are and our struggle to define ourselves.

Never think you can separate who you are from what you're doing.

Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period

The ultimate question of who we are is set before us at all times and answered with every action.

They say the two most important days in a person's life were the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born.

When you know your not going to die, you have to ask yourself... What's the highest and best use for myself.

Hopefully, great science fiction films help you think about issues that relate to yourself, whether it's: What's my purpose? Why am I here? What is it that makes me who I am? Those are the kind of questions my favorite science fiction films ask.

My friends don't understand, whether it's belonging to a country club or playing golf, or whatever a vacation is, that should make you happy. And it's like, "No, happiness is much deeper." I think people have to struggle to find things that give them purpose, the real meaning. Why am I alive? Why did God bless me with these skills or these resources? What am I to do with them? If God just lets some person be very fortunate, let's say financially, it's kind of a funny God.

The meaning of life is to get meaning for life.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

I'm really intrigued by those eternal questions of creation and belief and faith. I don't care who you are, it's what we all think about. It's in the back of all our minds.

Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?

If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

Who are you and what are you?... I need to know.