Paulo Coelho on Time

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

"Sometimes, when loneliness seems about to crush everything, the only way to resist is to keep on loving."

"A grain of sand is a moment of creation, and the universe has taken millions of years to create it."

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

"On 11 November 1997, Veronika decided that the moment to kill herself had — at last! — arrived."

"Time neither moves nor is stationary. Time changes."

"If victory is not theirs this time, it will be the next time. And if not the next time, then the time after that... The important thing is to get back on your feet. Only he who gives up is defeated. Everyone else is victorious."

"We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that’s of no use to the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It’s always new."

"It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you’re capable of far more than you imagined. You live in this vast body called the Universe, which contains all the solutions and all the problems. Visit your soul; don’t visit your past. The Universe goes through many mutations and carries the past with it. We call each of those mutations a ‘life,’ but just as the cells in your body change and yet you remain the same, so time does not pass, it merely changes."

"In magic—and in life—there is only the present moment, the now. You can’t measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. “Time” doesn’t pass. We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we’re always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn’t act as we should have. Or else we think about the future, about what we’re going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don’t want and how to get what we have always dreamed of."

"Others, even though they were defeated and feel humiliated by the things the winners are saying about them, will allow themselves to shed a few tears but will never succumb to self-pity. They know that this is a merely a pause in the fighting and that, for the moment, they are at a disadvantage. They try to work out what they did wrong and what they did right. They take advantage of this moment of defeat to rest, heal their wounds, devise new strategies and equip themselves better. Then the day dawns when a new battle knocks on their door. They are still afraid, but they have to act, either that or remain for ever lying on the ground. They get up and face their opponent, remembering the suffering they have endured and which they no longer wish to endure..."

"It’s nice to dream that we will have plenty of time in the future to do our travelling and that, one day, we will. It cheers us up because we know that we are capable of doing more than we do. Dreaming carries no risks. The dangerous thing is trying to transform your dreams into reality."

"At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their destiny."

"Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it’s Eternity. In India, they use the word ‘karma,’ for lack of any better term. It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future."

"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."

"When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny."

"That is how I would have acted before my accident, but now my personal history had become unimportant. It had stopped being history and was once more becoming a legend, a search, an adventure, a journey into and away from myself. I was once more in a time which the things around me were changing and that is how I wanted it to be for the rest of my days."

"I am not a foreigner, because I haven’t been praying to return safely home. I haven’t wasted my time imagining my house, my desk, my side of the bed. I am not a foreigner, because we are all traveling, we are all full of the same questions, the same tiredness, the same fears, the same selfishness, and the same generosity. I am not a foreigner, because, when I asked, I received."

"You have to take risks … We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. Every day, God gives us the sun — and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist — that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists — a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles."