Favorite Quotes from “The Alchemist”

Favorite Quotes from The Alchemist

One of my all-time favorite books, recommended by many close friends and family, would have to be The Alchemist. I don’t want to be cliche and say the book is life-changing, but this brilliant work genuinely is life-changing. There are so many lessons one can take away from this work by Paulo Coelho. These lessons can be found following along the journey of a shepherd boy, Santiago, from Spain to the deserts of Egypt. The remarkable story of Santiago is about his search for the treasure that consistently appears in his dreams and through trial and error he undertakes an adventure of finding what his Personal Legend, his purpose in life, is. He goes through a journey encountering serendipitous moments and unique individuals. Throughout his journey, these individuals stumbling upon his path played key roles in Santiago’s journey. He meets a crystal shop owner, a gypsy woman, a young girl named Fatima, a king, an alchemist, and much more. Lessons were taught and Santiago wasn’t the only one who listened to them. 

Now, these are five quotes from The Alchemist that I live by:

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

2. “My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

3. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

4. “The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”

5.  “…every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons that I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.”

Even though these quotes are only 198 words of the book, they may give a tinge of eagerness to read a 198-page book. Yes, I am counting the epilogue, the reading guide, and the author’s interview because they matter too. 

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