Paulo Coelho Quotes

You have to lose yourself to find yourself.

I don't know if you know who you are, until you lose who you are.

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

I did not lose myself all at once.

All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out, and reinvent yourself.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

I'm not interested in who am I. I'm interested in what's gone, the disinheritance, what I've been able to become or learn or fuse with or not fuse with. A certain freedom comes... I like it that way.

Life is a journey and it's about growing and changing and coming to terms with who and what you are and loving who and what you are.

I love the ability to transform because that, for me, is a liberation.

We spend so much of our early lives trying to figure out who we really are. And we spend the rest of our lives preparing ourselves to let it go.

I find myself only by losing myself.

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

Sometimes identity can be your salvation. It can be liberating to find your place in the world, but at some point, identity can hold you back.

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

Sometimes you have to lose everything in order to gain yourself.

Sometimes you have to lose yourself 'fore you can find anything.

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

Sometimes we can only find ourselves by first losing ourselves.

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.

You might have to lose control before you could find out what you'd been missing.

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.

In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself.

Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.

There are times when you don't know yourself. There are times when you don't want to know yourself. There are times when you want to be what you have never allowed yourself to be before.