The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream

by Paulo Coelho

The heat lasted until nightfall, and all that time he had to carry his jacket. But when he thought to complain about the burden of its weight, he remembered that, because he had the jacket, he had withstood the cold of the dawn.

The problem is that they don’t even realize that they’re walking a new road every day. They don’t see that the fields are new and the seasons change. All they think about is food and water.

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

He was sure that it made no difference to her on which day he appeared: for her, every day was the same, and when each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.

Well, there is only one piece of advice I can give you,’ said the wisest of wise men. ‘The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.’”

This wasn’t a strange place; it was a new one. After all, what he had always wanted was just that: to know new places.

making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

Maybe God created the desert so that man could appreciate the date trees, he thought.

God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom.

People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them.

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.