The Alchemist

I read this book for my book club and LOVED it. Here are my favorite quotes:

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

It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.

In the long run, what people think about shepherds and bakers becomes more important for them than their own personal legends.

He had to choose between something he had become accustomed to and something he wanted to have.

Then go back and observe the marvels of my world said the wise man. You cannot trust a man if you don't know his house.

If God leads the sheep so well, he will also lead a man, he thought, and that made him feel better. The tea seemed less bitter.

As he mused about these things, he realized that he had to choose between thinking of himself as the poor victim of a thief or as an adventurer in quest of his treasure. "I'm an adventurer looking for treasure" he said to himself.

Today I understand something I didn't see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

Yet the boy felt there was another way to regard his situation; he was actually two hours closer to his treasure...the fact that the two hours has stretched into an entire year didn't matter.

Maybe the world had other hidden treasures, but he had a dream and he had met with a king. That didn't happen to just anyone.

I'm going to find that damned alchemist, the Englishman thought. And the odor of the animals became a bit more tolerable.

But he was able to understand one thing: making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really driving into a strong current that will carry him places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

Not at all. It was shepherds who were the first to recognize a king the rest of the world refused to acknowledge.

We are afraid of loosing 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 history of the world are written by the same hand.

But there was one idea that seemed to repeat itself throughout all the books; all things are the manifestation of one thing only.

Maybe God created the desert so that man could appreciate the date trees he thought.

In the pursuit of his dream, he was being constantly subjected to tests of his persistence and courage. So he could not be hasty nor impatient. If he pushed forward impulsively, he would fail to see the signs and omens left by God along his path.

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.

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 it's dreams, because every second of the search is a seconds encounter with God and with eternity.

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

No one fails to suffer the consequences of everything under the sun.

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve; the fear of failure.

Each preforms it's own exact function as a unique being, and everything would be a symphony of peace if the hand that wrote all this Had stopped on the fifth day of creation.

The boy turned to the hand that wrote all. As he did so, he sensed that the universe had fallen silent, and he decided not to speak.

"You knew the whole story. You even left a bit of gold at the monastery as I could get back to this church. The monk laughed when he saw me come back in tatters. Couldn't you have saved me from that?" "No" he heard a voice on the wind say. "If I had told you, you wouldn't have seen the pyramids. They're beautiful, aren't they?"