Alexis > Alexis's Quotes

“Much of the time the mind is wandering, either drawn to focus, ruminate, or push away unpleasant experiences, or chasing after stuff we like. But if we don’t practise being still, we are prone to get blown about by every wind, buffeted by the ups and downs of life. By training to pay attention precisely and gently to the breath, coming back again and again, we cultivate a resilience that allows us to be present when difficulty and temptation arises. Distractions still come, but we don’t get so lost in them.”
― Ed Halliwell

“The meaning of life is not a search—it is a choice. Meaning is not found in things; meaning is what you make of things. The world means nothing by itself. You give it all the meaning it has. Thus, the meaning of life is a choice you make, not just once, but every waking hour of your day. 

Life is like art—it is all about interpretation. The moment anything happens to you, you interpret a meaning for it. The meaning you vote for then governs your perception, your thinking, your faith, your choices, your feelings, your behaviors, everything! Whenever you elect a new meaning, this changes everything.”
― Robert Holden

“I realized that despite the fear and the bruises of life, one has to keep on fighting for one's dream. As Borges said in his writings "there is no other virtue than being brave." And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.”
― Paulo Coelho

“What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. You have a choice in life: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief or as much displeasure as possible as the price for an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys”
― Nietzsche

“...there is something very vital happening when we breathe—without it we die—but trying to speed it up, force it, grasp it, push it away or control it tends to get in the way. As in breathing, so in life—we can learn a lot from the natural rhythm, pace, and un-fussiness of the way breath continues its work, without making a big deal out of it.”
― Ed halliwell

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“You see, during my pilgrimage it became increasingly apparent that I wasn't happy and I had to do something about it - stop making excuses. I realized that you don't have to jump through a series of complicated hoops to achieve a goal. You can just look at a mountain and get a connection with God; you don't have to understand the mountain to feel that.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Sometimes writing is pure hell. I'll write something and look at it in a few hours and say, "This is crap. What will I do with my life? I'll never write again." It's a bipolar business, and you bounce back. You become gripped with some new insight that shows the way.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich

“Sometimes the greatest fear and pain come from a sense of meaninglessness in life. Meaning is a choice, not a search, remember? A sense of meaninglessness is really, therefore, a call to let in higher awareness and truth.

”
― Robert Holden

“Perhaps... these days of less sunlight are opportunities for more contemplative time, more looking deeply to see what can only be seen in the dark.”
― Sylvia Boorstein

“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“But people normally marry, and then they want that locked in time, so they think they're not going to change. We're going to change. Everybody's going to change. So accepting that changes are part of our lives makes marriage a blessing and not a curse, because love is stronger than anything else.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Love isn't just a feeling. It's an art. And like any art, it takes not only inspiration but also a lot of work.”
― Paulo Coelho, Adultery

“Sometimes things don't change the way we expect or want. But that doesn't mean the Universe is not hard at work on our behalf. It just means that life has its own way of helping us. And that often means bringing outworn patterns of thought or behavior to our attention so we can move closer to that deep, authentic Self we long for and that is always already present.”
― Cheryl Eckl

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other. Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meetings are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes direction.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.”
― Paulo Coelho

“And I saw you — I saw you saying that sometimes compassion is understood like being awake, and being unable to react. So every morning, I find myself a different person. I’m always a mystery to myself. If I knew in the first hours of the morning, what I’m going to do, what is going to happen, what attitude or decision should I take? I think my life would be deadly boring because, well, what makes life interesting is the unknown. It is the risks that we take every single moment of our day — of a single day. So, I think that this contradiction should be accepted. Having said that, I mean that learning how to live with our contradictions does not keep us away from the ethic and respecting our neighbor, and learning about tolerance, and learning about compassion. These are two very important words today that were totally forgotten. If you have tolerance and compassion, you can go to the battle, in the metaphoric sense of course, fighting for your dreams without harming anyone.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Like my heart and like my soul, it continues to live every day, because my heart and soul are in it. And my heart and soul is your heart and soul. I am Santiago the shepherd boy in search of my treasure, just as you are Santiago the shepherd boy in search of your own. The story of one person is the story of everyone, and one man's quest is the quest of all of humanity, which is why I believe The Alchemist continues all these years later to resonate with people from different cultures all around the world, touching them emotionally and spiritually, equally, without prejudice.”
― Paulo Coelho

“You have the subconscious mind that sometimes is attracting tragedy, attracting bad things, because you want to be a victim. Because to be a victim is to justify a lot of frustrations and failures in your life... You want to be successful? The universe is helping you.”
― Paulo Coelho

“We help each other by sharing our experiences. At the end of the day, the human condition requests one thing: to share. You are not here just to profit. If you don’t share, you are nothing. I’ll give you an example. You can be watching the most beautiful sunset, in the most beautiful place in the world, and this beautiful sunset can be an oppressive experience because you have nobody to share it with. But if you are in a bazaar or a train station full of people, even without any beautiful sunset, it gives you more emotion, more interaction, it becomes a kind of paradise. We are born to share, we are really born to share, so you have to do it. You have to share what you have. In my case, the Internet is a tool to share. My blog is free. Facebook is free. It’s an inner cause I have: to use my celebrity to bring people together and share what I have and what each of them have.”
― Paulo Coelho

“The hand that stretches the bow must open like a child's hand opens. What sometimes hinders the precision of the shot is the archer's over-active will. He thinks: "What I fail to do will not be done", and that's not quite how things work. Man should always act, but he must also let other forces of the universe act in their own due time.”
― Eugen Herrigel

“I think it's strange - so alike and yet so different! We are capable of working together, of building the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the cathedrals of Europe and the temples of Peru. We can compose unforgettable music, work in hospitals, create new computer programs.

"But at some moment all this loses its meaning, and we feel alone, as if we were part of another world, different from the one we have helped to build."

"At times, when others need our help, we grow desperate because this prevents us from enjoying life. At other times, when nobody needs us, we feel useless.

"But that's the way we are. We are complex human beings. Why despair?”
― Anonymous

“We are what we think. All that we are comes from our thoughts. Through thought we construct and destroy the world. Thought follows us like a cart follows the pair of oxen. We are what we think. Your imagination can cause you more harm than your worst enemy. But once you control your thoughts, no one can help you as much as they can - not even your father or mother.”
― Anonymous

“What do you want? You can’t want to be happy, because that’s too easy and too boring. You can’t want only to love, because that’s impossible. What do you want? You want to justify your life, to live it as intensely as possible. That is at once a trap and a source of ecstasy. Try to be alert to that danger and experience the joy and the adventure of being that woman who is beyond the image reflected in the mirror.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

“It perplexes me how many people write books where everyone comes from the same basic set of backgrounds—middle class, white, straight, etc. It's like writing a book set in a world without coincidences, accidents, and colors. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? It reduces drama and conflicts and narrows the possible variety of points of view. And really, the whole magic of books is to show us the world through someone else's eyes. Experiencing the Other is what novels are for.”
― Scott Westerfeld

“What I will say is that you have to exercise your writing muscle. Write every day. Get better at it. Read a lot of good books. As a professional writer, I force myself to write when I don't feel like it. I don't wait to feel inspired. It takes discipline and grit and sacrifice to be able to bring a book out to the world. It's so much work, and it's very difficult, but it is also the most fun I've ever had. I love making things up. I love amusing myself.”
― Melissa de la Cruz

“Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood