Eleven Minutes Paulo Coelho Quotes

When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?

Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free.

I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life.

No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it

The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.

When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.

I’ve learned that waiting is the most difficult bit, and I want to get used to the feeling, knowing that you’re with me, even when you’re not by my side.

Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant.

Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or--such is the pleasure they experience--they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.

Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.

I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I'm a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body and doing battle with each other.

At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.

Don't listen to the malicious comments of those friends who, never taking any risks themselves, can only see other people's failures.

Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path. No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded. Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything. Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I don't know.

Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone.

Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.

All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.

I'm not a body with a soul, I'm a soul that has a visible part called the body.

...and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave.

In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.

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.

but something always went wrong, and the relationship would end precisely at the moment when she was sure that this was the person with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. After a long time, she came to the conclusion that men brought only pain, frustration, suffering and a sense of time dragging.

You can either be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It all depends on how you view your life.

The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.

Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.

Dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice.

Sometimes life is very mean: a person can spend days, weeks, months and years without feeling new. Then, when a door opens - a positive avalanche pours in. One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with.

بإمكان الكائن البشري أن يتحمل العطش أسبوعا، والجوع أسبوعين، بإمكانه أن يقضى سنوات دون سقف، لكنه لا يستطيع تحنل الوحدة، لأنها أسوأ انواع العذاب والألم.

If I must be faithful to someone or something, I have, first of all, have to be faithful to myself.

It is not time that changes man nor knowledge the only thing that can change someone's mind is love.

Love is not to be found in someone else but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person.

I’ve met a man and fallen in love with him. I allowed myself to fall in love for one simple reason: I’m not expecting anything to come of it. I know that, in three months’ time, I’ll be far away and he’ll be just a memory, but I couldn’t stand living without love any longer; I had reached my limit… Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meeting 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 directions.

What made you fall in love with a prostitute?” “I didn’t understand it myself at the time. But I’ve thought about it since, and I think it was because, knowing that your body would never be mine alone, I had to concentrate on conquering your soul.

Love one another, but let’s try not to possess one another.

I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won’t survive.

But if I don’t think about love, I will be nothing.

Life moves very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.

No one owns anything. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine.

everyone knows how to love because we are all born with that gift.

Sometimes, you get no second chance and that its best to accept the gifts the world offers you.

Read. Forget everything you've been told about books and read.

هناك مثل مأثور وهو متداول فى جميع لغات العالم، يقول: "بعيد عن العين، بعيد عن القلب". أؤكد لكم إن هذا القول خاطئ تماما. كلما بعدنا، استيقظت المشاعر التى نحاول تناسيها وسلخها من القلب. عندما نكون فى المنفى، نسعى لأن نحتفظ بأقل ذكرى تذكرنا بجذورنا. وعندما نكون بعيدين عن الكائن المحبوب، نتذكره عبر كل إنسان يمر بنا فى الشارع.

you only know yourself when you go beyond your limits

The true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

That's what the world is like: people talk as if they knew everything, but ifyou dare to ask a question, they don't know anything.

The most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage.

He's seeing my soul, my fears, my fragility, my inability to deal with a world which i pretend to master, but about which I know nothing

And the person who loves wholeheartedly feels free.

When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left!

أحيانا تكون الحياة بخيلة جدا. قد نقضى أياما وأسابيع وأشهرا وسنوات دون أن نشعر بشئ. ثم، فجأة، وما أن نفتح الباب، حتى ينهار جبل الجليد وتنجلى أمامنا الطريق واسعة فى لحظة واحدة. نخال أننا لا نملك شيئا، ثم لا نلبث أن نشعر أننا نمتلك ما لا طاقة لنا على امتلاكه!

Its best to live as if it were the first and last day of my life.

a man doesn't prove he's a man by getting an erection. He's only a real man if he can pleasure a woman. And if he can pleasure a prostitute, he'll think he's the best lover on the block" -Nyah

The roller-coaster is my life; life is a fast, dizzying game; life is a parachute jump; it’s taking chances, falling over and getting up again; it’s mountaineering; it’s wanting to get to the very top of yourself and feeling angry and dissatisfied when you don’t manage it

The aim of every human being is to understand the meaning of total love.

She wasn't a victim of fate, she was running her own risks, pushing beyond her own limits, experiencing things which, one day, in the silence of her heart, in the tedium of old age, she would remember almost with nostalgia - however absurd that might seem.

really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.

we are human beings, we are born full of guilt; we feel terrified when happiness becomes a real possibility.

She was doing it because she had nothing to lose, because her life was one of constant, day to day frustration.

now that she realized she had been waiting for him—she did not like that.

The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here.

A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; A time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; A time of war, and a time of peace

عندما نلتقى أحدهم ونقع فى غرامه , نشعر ان الكون كله يطاوعنا فى هذا الاتجاه . هذا ما حدث لى اليوم عند مغيب الشمس . لكن اذا حدث خلل منا , فان كل شئ عندئذ يتلاشئ ويختفى ! طيور مالك الحزين والموسيقى الصادحة فى البعيد وطعم شفتيه . ترى , كيف يمكن للجمال الذى كان حاضرآ بقوة ان يختفى بهذه السرعة ويتلاشئ ؟

How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?

هناك مثل مأثور وهو متداول فى جميع لغات العالم . يقول : بعيد عن العين , بعيد عن القلب . أؤكد لكم أن هذا القول خاطئ تماما . كلما بعدنا , استيقظت المشاعر التى نحاول تناسيها وسلخها من القلب . عندما نكون فى المنفى , نسعى لأن نحتفظ عن الكائن المحبوب , تتذكره عبر كل انسان يمر بنا فى الشارع

يتكلم الناس كما لو أنهم يعرفون كل شئ. لكن إذا تجرأت وسألتهم، فإنك تُدرك أنهم لا يعرفون شيئا.

ان الحب يتجلى فى غياب الحبيب اكثر منه فى حضوره

She asks him to touch her, to feel her with his hands, because bodies always understand each other, even when souls do not.

That the truest experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

She wants to drink that man too, and then she can forget forever the cheap wine that you gulp down and that makes you feel drunk, but always leaves you with a headache and an empty space in your soul.

Facing the difficulties, I can choose either to be a poor victim or a great adventurer.

أنا من الأشخاص الذين يظن الجميع أنهم يملكون الأجابات عن كل شئ . والسبب أنه بقدر ما نلوذ بالصمت , نبدو أذكياء فى نظر الاخرين

When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

She looked at her own past, and, for the first time, she forgave herself: it hadn't been her fault, but the fault of that insecure little boy, who had given up after the first attempt.

ليس للكون من معنى الا حين بكون لدينا احد يشاطرنا انفعالاتنا

But if we are talking in terms of making progress in life, we must understand that "good enough" is very different from "best.

If you want to achieve your objectives, you have to be prepared for a daily dose of pain or discomfort. At first, it's unpleasant and demotivating, but in time you come to realise that it's part of the process of feeling good, and the moment arrives when, if you don't feel pain, you have a sense that the exercises aren't having the desired effect.

Does a soldier go to war in order to kill the enemy? no, he goes in order to die for his country. Does a wife want to show her husband how happy she is? no, she wants him to see how she suffers in order to make him happy Does the husband go to work thinking he will find personal fulfillment there? no, he is giving his sweat and tears for the good of the family And so it goes on: sons give up their dreams to please their parents, parents give up their lives in order to please their children; pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that should bring only LOVE..

He said something like that: “In all languages in the world, there is the same proverb: ‘What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.’ Well, I say that there isn’t any ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget. If we’re far from exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots. If we’re far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the street reminds us of them. At the end of the service, I went up to him and thanked him: I said I was a stranger in a strange land, and I thanked him for reminding me that what the eyes don’t see, the heart does grieve over. And my heart has grieved so much, that today I’m leaving.

‎If I stay another day, I'll be here for another year. And if I stayed another year, I'll never leave.

Life is too short, or too long, for me to allot myself the luxury of living it so badly.

You experienced pain yesterday and you discovered that it led to pleasure.You experienced it today and found peace.That's why I'm telling you:Don't get used to it,because it's very easy to become habituated:it's a very powerful drug.It's in our daily lives,in our hidden sufferings,in the sacrifices we make,blaming love for the destruction of our dreams.Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it's seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or se-denial.Or cowardice.However much we may reject it,we human human beings always find a way of being with pain,of flirting with it and making it part of our lives.

A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love. What nonsense! The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin.

PAIN was no longer a cause of suffering, but a source of pleasure, Because they were redeeming humanity from its sins. Pain becomes joy, the meaning of life, pleasure..

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. "Once upon a time" is how all the best children's stories begin, and "prostitute" is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let's keep that beginning.

We live in a vale of tears...We can have all the dreams we like, but life is hard, implacable, sad.

The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.

I love you', though, were three words she had often heard during her twenty-two years, and it seemed to her that they were now completely devoid of meaning, because they had never turned into anything serious or deep, never translated into a lasting relationship.

I think that perhaps we always fall in love the very first instant we see the man of our dreams, even though, at the time, reason may be telling us otherwise, and we may fight against that instinct, hoping against hope that we won't win, until there comes a point when we allow ourselves to be vanquished by our feelings.

sometimes life is very mean: a person can spend days, weeks, months and years w/out feeling anything new. Then, when a door opens - a positive avalanche pours in. One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with..

It hurt when I lost each the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

Millions of couples out there practiced the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realizing it. They went to work, came back, complained about everything, insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realizing that all it would take was a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression.

Dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice. That way, we avoid all the risks, frustrations and difficulties, and when we are old, we can always blame other people - preferably our parents, our spouses or our children - for our failure to realise our dreams.

I've realised that sometimes you get no second chance and that it's best to accept the gifts the world offers you. Of course it's risky, but is the risk any greater than the chance of the bus that took forty-eight hours to bring me here having an accident? If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. If I'm looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system. The little experience of life I've had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion - and that applies to material as well as spiritual things. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever (as has happened often enough tome already) finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine; it's best to live as if today were the first (or last) day of my life.

وهناك من يتصرفون عكس ذلك , يستسلمون دون تفكير للشغف , أملين أن يجدوا فيه الحل لجميع مشكلاتهم , يوكلون الى الأخر الى أمر اسعادهم ويحفلونه أيضا وزر تعاستهم . هم أما فى حالة أغتباط لأنهم يشعرون أن شيئا رائعا يحصل لهم , واما فى حالة أحباط لأن هذا الحدث غير المتوقع الذى حل بهم دمر لديهم كل بارقة من الأمل .

I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion & adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I'm a housewife & a prostitute, both of us living in the same body & doing battle with each other. The meeting of these two women is a game with serious risks. A divine dance. When we meet, we are two divine energies, two universes colliding. If the meeting is not carried out with due reverence, one universe destroys the other.

تحت تأثير الشغف , نتوقف عن الطعام والنوم والعمل وتكف حمائم السلام عن التحليق فوقنا . ثمة ناس كثيرون يخافون من الشغف , لانه يدمر فى طريقه كل ما يتعلق بالماضى ولا يرغب أحدآ منا فى رؤية عالمه منهارا . لذا يحاول الكثيرون السيطرة على الخطر الذى يتهدد عالمهم ويتوصلون الى البقاء صامدين أمام العاصفة وهى فى أساسها اشبه بالغبار . هؤلاء هم مهندسو الأشياء التى تخطاها الزمن .

Despite her apparent freedom, her life consisted of endless hours spent waiting for a miracle, for true love, for an adventure with the same romantic ending she had seen in films and read about in books. A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love. What nonsense! The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin. Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's whole life, from one moment to the next. But there was the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.

Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone. From that point onwards, things change, the man and the woman come into play, but what happens before – the attraction that brought them together – is impossible to explain. It is untouched desire in its purest state. When desire is still in this pure state, the man and the woman fall in love with life, they live each moment reverently, consciously, always ready to celebrate the next blessing. When people feel like this, they are not in a hurry, they do not precipitate events with unthinking actions. They know that the inevitable will happen, that what is real always finds a way of revealing itself. When the moment comes, they do not hesitate, they do not miss an opportunity, they do not let slip a single magic moment, because they respect the importance of each second.

Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colorful, marvelous feathers. One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird. But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she thought: “I’m going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again.” The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage. She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: “Now you have everything you could possibly want.” However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage. One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds. If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body. Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. “Why have you come?” she asked Death. “So that you can fly once more with him across the sky,” Death replied. “If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him ever more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.