"Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live, and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now. "I'm afraid of committing myself, she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pan, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes not to see the bad things in life."

"If I must fall, may it be from a high place."

"There was a time when people accepted magical experiences as natural. There were no priests then, and no one went chasing after the secrets of the occult."

"She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors--white, black, yellow--with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone's, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before, and she gave herself to all that was most base and most pure."

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

"If you have a past with which you feel dissatisfied, then forget it, now. Imagine a new story for your life and believe in it. Focus only on the moments when you achieved what you desired, and that strength will help you to get what you want."

"So long as you do no harm to another, change your opinion once in a while. Contradict yourself without being embarrassed. This is your right. It doesn't matter what others think -because that's what they will think, in any case."

"For years, I had fought against my heart, because I was afraid of sadness, suffering, and abandonment. But now I knew that true love was above all that and that it would be better to die than to fail to love.I had thought that only others had the courage to love. But now I discovered that I too was capable of loving. Even if loving meant leaving, or solitude, or sorrow, love was worth every penny of its price."

"You could have died later on, you could have died after peace had been declared. But, in any case, you were going to die."

"The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter."

"Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows."

"In war, the key to victory is the ability to surprise one's opponent."

"Anyone who loves in the expectation of being loved in return is wasting their time."

"The Universe Conspires....to get what you truly desire."

"Stay close 2 those who r by ur side in happy times, because they do not harbor jealousy or envy in their hearts, only joy 2 c u happy..."

"It's what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is. 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... It's a force that appears to be negative, but actually shows you how to realize your destiny. It prepares your spirit and you will, because there is one great truth on this planet: whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth."

"A dream is always risky, for there is a price to pay."

"We are always trying to convert people to a belief in our own explanation of the universe. We think that the more people there are who believe as we do, the more certain it will be that what we believe is the truth. But it doesn't work that way at all."

"If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself."

"Stay insane, but behave like normal people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do so without attracting attention. Concentrate on this flower and allow the real "I" to reveal itself."

"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 diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision."

"Where there is loyalty, weapons are of no use."

"When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too."

"It's a good idea always to do something relaxing prior to making an important decision in your life."

"So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you."

"When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream."

"The act if living one's own destiny includes a series of stages that are far beyond our understanding, whose objective is always to... make us learn the lessons necessary to fulfill our own destiny."

"Never stop dreaming, the old king had said."Follow the omens."

"To die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one's departure from this world."

"They're tulip seeds, the symbol of our country.But, more than that, they represent a truth you must learn. These seeds will always be tulips, even if at the moment you cannot tell them apart from other flowers. They will never turn into roses or sunflowers, no matter how much they might desire to. And if they try to deny their own existence, they will live life bitter and die."

"You came so that you could learn about your dreams," said the old woman. "And dreams are the language of God. When he speaks in our language, I can interpret what he has said. But if he speaks in the language of the soul, it is only you who can understand."

"The future belongs to God, and it is only he who reveals it, under extraordinary circumstances. How do I guess at the future? Based on the omens of the present. 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. Forget about the future, and live ach day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity."

"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."

"Man needs what's worst in him in order to achieve what's best in him."

"God, in his infinite wisdom, hid Hell in the middle of Paradise, to keep us on our toes."

"Whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth."

"If a person is living out his Personal Legend, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."

"When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenomena 'signs', the sceptics 'coincidence', and psychologists 'concentrated focus', although I've yet to find out what term historians would use)."

"I will lament your departure. I will hide my shame for having erred on some obscure point, for thinking that the justice of war is the same of peacetime."

"Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we've learned as we've moved toward that dream. That's the point at which most people give up. It's the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one 'dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon."

"Every day was there to be lived or to mark one's departure from this world."

"Waiting Hurts. Forgetting Hurts. But not knowing which decision to take is the worst of suffering."

"Forgive but do not forget, or you will be hurt again. Forgiving changes the perspectives. Forgetting loses the lesson."

"If theater is ritual, then dance is too... It's as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you."

"Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn't care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous."

"You're always learning. The problem is, sometimes you stop and think you understand the world. This is not correct. The world is always moving. You never reach the point you can stop making an effort."

"The world is being created and destroyed in this very moment."

"People who believed the world to be an undignified,inglorious place, and who spent their evenings and nightstalking on and on about the mistakes others had made. They werepeople whom solitude had made into the judges of the world,whose verdicts were scattered to the four winds for whoever cared to listen."

"He could always go back to be a shepherd, but he had a dream. That's doesn't happen to just anyone."

"Do not be ashamed to make a temporary withdrawal from the field if you see that your enemy is stronger than you; it is not winning or losing a single battle that matters, but how the war ends."