Maryam > Maryam's Quotes

“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?”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“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.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“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 They are the engineers of the superseded.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.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“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.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“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”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“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.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“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.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“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.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“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.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“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..”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“‎If I stay another day, I'll be here for another year. And if I stayed another year, I'll never leave.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“No one wants to suffer, and yet nearly everyone seeks out pain and sacrifice, and then they feel justified, pure, deserving of the respect of their children, husbands, neighbors, God. Don't let's think about that now; all you need to know is that what makes the world go round is not the search for pleasure, but the renunciation of all that is important.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“What? 'Borderline patients play games'? That what you said? Ernest, you'll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That's exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis. There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can't treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying on the Couch

“Nonetheless, the past is part of your present consciousness—it forms the spectacles through which you experience the present.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying On The Couch

“We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.

As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It's obvious, it stares you in the fact. There must be a God and he can't know anything about us.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you. ”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.”
― John Fowles, The Collector