Neruda wrote in a variety of styles such as erotically charged love poems as in his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope.

On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda’s arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

1. Someday, somewhere – anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.

2. The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

3. A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn’t play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly.

4. Laughter is the language of the soul.

5. You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

6. Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.

7. I think it was very informative, but a lot still needs to be done.

8. my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping but I shall go on living.

Of everything I have seen,
it’s you I want to go on seeing:
of everything I’ve touched,
it’s your flesh I want to go on touching.
I love your orange laughter.
I am moved by the sight of you sleeping.

What am I to do, love, loved one?
I don’t know how others love
or how people loved in the past.
I live, watching you, loving you.
Being in love is my nature.

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Never an illness, nor the absence
of grandeur, no,
nothing is able to kill the best in us,
that kindness, dear sir, we are afflicted with:
beautiful is the flower of man, his conduct,
and every door opens on the beautiful truth
and never hides treacherous whispers.

I always gained something from making myself better,
better than I am, better than I was,
that most subtle citation:
to recover some lost petal
of the sadness I inherited:
to search once more for the light that sings
inside of me, the unwavering light.

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Sonnet XXV

Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
Objects:
Nothing mattered or had a name:
The world was made of air, which waited.

I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled ‘get lost’,
Questions that insisted in the sand.

Everything was empty, dead, mute,
Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all

Belonged to someone else – to no one:
Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

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Love Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, or topaz
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way

Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro Brazil. He attended a Jesuit school. As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer. Upon telling his mother this, she responded with “My dear, your father is an engineer. He’s a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?” After researching, Coelho concluded that a writer “always wears glasses and never combs his hair” and has a “duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation,” amongst other things. At 17, Coelho’s introversion and opposition to following a traditional path led to his parents committing him to a mental institution from which he escaped three times before being released at the age of 20. Coelho later remarked that “It wasn’t that they wanted to hurt me, but they didn’t know what to do… They did not do that to destroy me, they did that to save me.”

At his parents’ wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and abandoned his dream of becoming a writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, traveling through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and becoming immersed in the drug culture of the 1960s. Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter, composing lyrics for Elis Regina, Rita Lee, and Brazilian icon Raul Seixas. Composing with Raul led to Paulo being associated with satanism and occultism, due to the content of some songs. In 1974, Coelho was arrested and tortured for “subversive” activities by the ruling military government, who had taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous.

In 1986, Coelho walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, a turning point in his life. On the path, Coelho had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The Pilgrimage. In an interview, Coelho stated “[In 1986], I was very happy in the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and water — to use the metaphor in The Alchemist, I was working, I had a person who I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and still is, to be a writer.” Coelho would leave his lucrative career as a songwriter and pursue writing full-time.

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Other Paulo Coelho’s Sayings:

1. It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary.

2. When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

3. No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

4. Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose – and commit myself to – what is best for me.

5. The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.

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

7. Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.

8. You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.

9. You have to take risks, he said. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

10. But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.

11. Our dreams give us strength to perform impossible tasks.

12. Don’t place your dreams in the hands of those whom can destroy them.

13. You are your dreams.

14. You cannot avoid pain, but you can chose to overcome it.

15. Every time you wish something, keep your eyes wide open, focus and know exactly what you want. No one hits the target with eyes closed.

16. You are the light of the world. Shine, and darkness will disappear.

17. Joy goes against the foundations of mathematics: it multiplies when we divide.

18. Many people are afraid to hope. They want to be prepared for failure.

19. Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back. Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person – nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need.

20. Close some doors. Not because of pride, but because that no longer fits your life.

21. Life has many ways of testing a person’s will; either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once

Theologically, he is best known for his major three-volume work Systematic Theology (1951–63), in which he developed his “method of correlation”: an approach of exploring the symbols of Christian revelation as answers to the problems of human existence raised by contemporary existential philosophical analysis.

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He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, director, stage designer, screenwriter, comedian, humorist, newspaper and magazine columnist, radio broadcaster and television presenter.

A noted wit and raconteur, he was, for much of his career, a fixture on television talk shows and lecture circuits, as well as a respected intellectual and diplomat who, in addition to his various academic posts, served as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and President of the World Federalist Movement.

Ustinov was the winner of numerous awards over his life, including Academy Awards, Emmy Awards, Golden Globes and BAFTA Awards, as well the recipient of governmental honours from, amongst others, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. He displayed a unique cultural versatility that has frequently earned him the accolade of a Renaissance Man.

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1. At the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords we’re all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.

2. Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

3. Men think about women. Women think about what men think about them.