PAULO COELHO

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

"Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing."

"Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance."

"Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious."

"The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."

"No good deed goes unpunished."

"Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."

"After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations."

"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history."

"Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary."

"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

"To define is to limit."

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."

"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."

"The world is a stage and the play is badly cast."

"I can resist anything except temptation."

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

"A good friend will always stab you in the front."

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."

"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."

"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

"Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them."

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

"He knew one of the women well, and had shared his universe with her. They had seen the same mountains, and the same trees, although each of them had seem them differently. She knew his weaknesses, his moments of hatred, of despair. Yet she was there at his side. They shared the same universe."

"Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood."

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them."

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

"One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving."

"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."

"One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry."

"I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after."

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."

"If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life."

"To lose one parent, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

"When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way."

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

"If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him."

"Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping."

"Hearts are made to be broken."