The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream

by Paulo Coelho

There is always a chance for reconciliation, a chance that one day he and I will sit around a table together and put an end

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to our history of clashes. And on this day, he will tell me his story and I will tell him mine.

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“Well … so I can do things,” he had responded. “And so I can change those things that I don’t want to happen.” “But then they wouldn’t be a part of your future,” the seer had said. “Well, maybe I just want to know the future so I can prepare myself for what’s coming.” “If good things are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise,” said the seer. “If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur.”

Yes

Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this

world. Everything depended on one word: “Maktub.” Walking along

“Isn’t wine prohibited here?” the boy asked “It’s not what enters men’s mouths that’s evil,” said the alchemist. “It’s what comes out of their mouths that is.”

“You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love … the love that speaks the Language of the World.”

“If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.”

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering

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.

“Your eyes show the strength of your soul,” answered the alchemist.

“If a person is living out his Personal Legend, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

“That’s what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”

The alchemist said, “No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the

history of the world. And normally he doesn’t know it.” The boy