Monday, May 11, 2009

THE ALCHEMIST by Paulo Coelho

This book helped me understand a lot of things. It witnessed the most devastating events of my life, it was there when i smiled and it scooped my tears when i cried.

I noted on the important lessons it taught me:


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


If you start out by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work toward getting it.


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.


Making a decision was only the beginning of things. 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.


The closer one gets to realizing his destiny, the more that destiny becomes his true reason for being.


No matter how many detours and adjustments it made, the caravan moved toward the same compass point. Once obstacles were overcome, it returned to its course, sighting on a star that indicated the location of the oasis.


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


We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.


Once you get into the desert, there's no going back. And, when you can't go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward. The rest is up to Allah, including the danger.


You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his destiny. If he abandons that pursuit, it's because it wasn't true love...the love that speaks of the Language of the World.


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


If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on you return.


The wise men understood that this natural world is only an image and a copy of paradise. The existence of this world is simply a guarantee that there exists a world that is perfect. God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom.


Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came form the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there.


Wherever your heart is, that is where you'll find your treasure.


You will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you're thinking about life and about the world.


You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say. That way, you'll never have to fear an unanticipated blow.


"Even though I complain sometimes," it said, "it's because I'm the heart of a person, and people's hearts are that way. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly."


Every second of the search is an encounter with God. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because I've known that every hour was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I've discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve.


"Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him," his heart said. "We, people's hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, toward its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them - the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place."


From then on, the boy understood his heart. He asked it, please, never to stop speaking to him. He asked that, when he wandered far from his dreams, his heart press him and sound the alarm. The boy swore that, every time he heard the alarm, he would heed its message.


Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we've learned as we've moved toward that dream. That's the point at which most people give up. It's the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.


Every search begins with a beginner's luck. And every search ends with the victor's being severely tested.


When you possess great treasures within you, and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed.


Your eyes show the strength of your soul.


If a person is living out his destiny, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.


Then you'll die in the midst of trying to realize your destiny. That's a lot better than dying like millions of other people, who never even knew what their destinies were.


Usually, the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives.


"You could have died later on," a soldier said to the body of one of his companions. "You could have died after peace had been declared. But, in any case, you were going to die."


When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you, and even men can turn themselves into the wind. As long as the wind helps, of course.


Because it's not love to be static like the desert, nor is it love to roam the world like the wind. And it's not lvoe to see everything from a distance, like you do. Love is the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World. When I first reached through to it, I though the Soul of the World was perfect. But later, I could see that it was like other aspects of creation, and had its owns passions and wars. It is we who nourish the Soul of the World, and the world we live in will be either better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse. And that's where the power of love comes in. Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.


Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.


No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.


As he was about to climb yet another dune, his heart whispered, "Be aware of the place where you are brought to tears. That's where I am, and that's where your treasure is."


Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist. Published 1992. Translated by Alan R. Clarke. ISBN 0-7225-3292-8.

3 comments:

Miong said...

/what else did you learn?

Prince said...

I so love this book... it taught me more essential things invisible to the eye...

honey said...

i learned how to listen to one's heart and heed its advice.