The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.

1. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.

2. Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.

3. Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.

4. The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

5. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

6. Only the dead have seen the end of war.

7. Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

8. The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

9. You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

10. Never discourage anyone … who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.

11. Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

12. Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.

13. I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with.

14. There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

15. When men speak ill of thee, live so that nobody will believe them.

16. If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

17. How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

18. Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.

19. The measure of a man is what he does with power.

20. Courage is a kind of salvation. Courage is knowing what not to fear.

21. There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.

22. Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.

23. “Excellence” is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice. We do not act “rightly” because we are “excellent”, in fact we achieve “excellence” by acting “rightly”.

24. A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

25. The beginning is the most important part of the work.

26. People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.

27. An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.

28. I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

29. Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

30. No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.

31. The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.

32. Man is a being in search of meaning.

33. The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.

34. To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory; to be vanquished by one’s own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat.

35. He who wishes to serve his country must have not only the power to think, but the will to act.

36. The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.

1. The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.

2. … feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.

3. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.

4. The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

5. The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.

6. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

7. Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.

8. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

9. You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.

10. Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?

11. If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart.

12. The more we witness our emotional reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain.

13. True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.

14. It isn’t the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.

15. Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

16. Every moment is unique, unknown, completely fresh.

17. Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it’s important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe.

18. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away or become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.

19. Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.

Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.

1. Everything you can imagine is real.

2. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

3. Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.

4. Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

5. There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun.

6. When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

7. I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

8. Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

9. Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

10. I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

11. He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

12. Go and do the things you can’t. That is how you get to do them.

1. Peace, healing and abundance do not come from the outside. They come from the inside, from consciousness itself. They come from the inner knowledge and experience of the Divine.

2. If you find yourself condemning your brother, you can be sure that it is not him you condemn. It is some shamed part of yourself you have not acknowledged.

3. The way you relate to your gift says a lot about whether you are happy or not. Happy people are expressing their gifts all their time, on whatever level and in whatever arena life offers them. Unhappy people are holding onto their gifts until life gives them the perfect venue.

4. You must speak the truth fearlessly, but with gentleness & compassion.

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.

9. Everything is so alive, that I can be alive. Without moving I can see it all. In your life I see everything that lives.

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.

_____________________________

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.

______________________________

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.

______________________________

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.

—————————————-

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

22. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Act because you need to act.

23. Telling the truth and making someone cry is better than telling a lie and making someone smile.

24. Don’t explain. Your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you.

25. If you act like a victim, you are likely to be treated as one.

26. One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.

27 May we understand that we can sell time, but we can’t buy it back.

28. Do something instead of killing time, because time is killing you.

29. Straight roads do not make skillful drivers.

30. I refuse to walk carefully through life only to arrive safely at death.

1. Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.

2. Language … has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.

3. The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.

4. We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.

5. He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.

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.

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.

4. The point of living and of being an optimist is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.

5. Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.

6. Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved.