The Alchemist

by Paulo Coelho

Foreword

I don't have a ready-made formula to apply when I embark on a new book. Still, I'm always controlled by many elements: discipline, compassion, and a sincere eagerness to understand myself. When I start a new book, I try to approach myself from a different angle. In THE ALCHEMIST, for example, I was trying to explain to myself what writing meant to me. The way I found to do this was through a metaphor. With this book I wanted to share with my readers the questions that make life a great adventure precisely because they have no answer. I wrote this book in two weeks.

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting,

To dream AND to act.

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

In today's society (as was the case in the past), there is a tremendous amount of energy spent on trying to make people conform: to established behavior, to established religions, namely, to a certain type of thought. This uniformity is very tricky because it comes through a certain «political correctness» that stifles people's spontaneity.

“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

My family was very strict and my father sent me to the Jesuit school so that I could have real discipline. The chains of rigor were so heavy throughout my youth that very quickly I started to doubt this religion that showed no mercy, only constraint and suffering. I remember being obliged to attend mass and the constant threats of hell in the mouths of the priests. Everything was sin, everything was forbidden, joy was ruled out. I think that my rebellion was what saved me. Rebellion is a blessing. And looking back, so is discipline. I thank my education for the discipline a writer needs to work on anything.

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.

If you are open to the world—this means you are open to other cultures, other religions, other places. It allows different cultures to share with each other the best they have, always respecting their own background. From the moment that one is able to understand that the world has a soul and that we are all part of it, we start to pay attention to very subtle things. We start treasuring the small things, the people next to us, the beauty of difference.

‘The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.’”

There’s a motto in Alchemy: “Concentrate and dissolve”. As you may know, alchemists would, through laboratory studies, try to distill mercury from sulphur and then refine the mercury until it converted into gold. This quest would lead them to the Philosopher’s Stone (which was the solid component) and the Long Life Elixir. All the process of distilling is based on this very simple motto: concentrate—meaning extracting the essence—and dissolve—meaning mixing the essence with something else. Many disregard that through this routine, alchemists were also training their patience and thus transforming their perception of the world. I think you can apply this same motto to love and to life: in order to preserve our freedom, one has to be able at the same time to dive into its essence and to share it with others.

It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.

Look to your soul. You probably don't know, but your soul knows. Enthusiasm is the key: if you feel this spark in your heart, you know that you are in the right path. That said, it is better to confront your demons than to do something that is just OK, and waste your life doing it.

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.

At school, I realized that I was able to express my feelings through writing. When I first decided to pay the price of my dream—to become a writer—I already knew that my mother could be right: nobody reads in Brazil, I would never be able to succeed. But I was not paralyzed by her advice, and I fought against all odds, because I needed more enthusiasm in life. There were moments that I was overcome by anxiety, or frustration, but I was wise enough to burn all my ships before engaging in my own adventure. There was no way back. Therefore, I see the future as a result of the present moment, and I see the present moment as a result of decisions that I was capable to take at the right time, against all advice.

people need not fear the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want.

For me a person that is alive is a person that is committed to a project, an idea, a dream. In my case, this means, choosing to be a writer in a country where this activity was regarded as impossible. To keep on writing about things that matter to me and not to the critics. To question myself every day, to keep on meeting with people, and to be open to the world. I think it's the confrontation with the soul that makes one's life interesting. I want to surprise myself and to keep on doubting because I believe that this is the core of life.

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

I was a rebel. I was against everything, and that is actually a good thing to be when you are of a young age. My parents tried to make me behave properly. They tried everything from threats, to complaints about how much I let them down, but nothing worked. They thought they had lost control and said to themselves: “He is mad. He wants to be an artist.” And then they committed me to this institution, and I learned at very young age that I had to fight. I chose not to look at myself as a victim but thought “Paulo, now you are experiencing the difficulties that real artists actually should experience.”

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

First and foremost, I am a writer—and a writer is always facing the challenge of a new book. This is, for me, what makes life interesting: there is always a new book to be written, which involves pain, joy, suffering, relief, feelings of a person who is alive. Do I have the fear of failure? Yes. But I can’t be paralyzed by this. To do that, I need to live my life fully, which I do, accepting all challenge and all possibilities. Having said that, I don’t think why this or that happened, and I became a worldwide celebrity. I think: “Am I honest in what I am doing? Can I still talk to my soul?” The secret of the success of my books, if there is one, it is the absence of secrets. When I wrote THE ALCHEMIST, it did not sell at all in its first year, it was totally ignored by the press because the media normally refuses to publish anything about an unknown writer. But it made its way to the readers, and the readers started to discover that we share the same questions. Little by little, the book started to travel abroad, and today is one of the best-selling books of all time. But this success came slowly, based on word-of-mouth promotion, and this gives me the sensation, the wonderful sensation, that I am not alone. My new book, THE ARCHER, will be out November 10. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52585195-the-archer