The Book That Changed My Life
I don’t believe in accidents when a book enters my life. And again when I come around to reading it. I know the timing of both has a purpose.
I was serving in the Peace Corps and had been in Morocco for 6 months when I came across, The Alchemist. I was 23 years old. A beautiful story and a must-read.
Peace Corps sent us to our different sites after three months of training. They mailed a handful of random books circulating among Peace Corps volunteers who served across the country over the years. Books I would not have picked on my own. I read them all. Not knowing anything about them. A lot of them were part of Oprah’s Book Club with a special sticker on the cover.
I later came to learn, that Pharrell Williams said The Alchemist is one of his favorite books. Oprah tells the story that Madonna introduced her to The Alchemist in 1996. The book is one of Oprah’s favorite spiritual guides. Initially, The Alchemist didn’t sell. However, The Alchemist went on to sell more than 65 million copies since it was first published in 1988 and has been translated into more than 80 languages.
Paulo Coelho, the author of The Alchemist, said he wrote the book in two weeks. Then he wrote the title. And then wrote the first two pages. The first sentence is “The boy’s name was Santiago.” Paulo said it was because he was fascinated by Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The main character in that book is also named Santiago.
The Alchemist is the story of a young Andalusian shepherd who, after dreaming about finding a treasure in the pyramids of Egypt, sells off his flock and embarks on a journey of courage and intuition that is a stand-in for all our journeys.
Maybe you’ve never read the book and the quotes will pique your interest. Or maybe you’ve read the book and the below quotes serve as a reminder. Either way, I wish you well on your Personal Legend journey.
In my journal, I wrote the 25 quotes that resonated with me while reading The Alchemist:
1. He recognized that he was feeling something he had never experienced before; the desire to live in one place forever.
2. It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.
3. 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.
4. 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 Personal Legend.
5. People learn, early in their lives, what is their reason for being…maybe that’s why they give up on it so early, too.
6. For her, every day was the same, and when each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.
7. Not everyone can see his dreams come true in the same way.
8. 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.
9. If I could, I’d write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence. It’s with those words that the universal language is written.
10. The closer one gets to realizing his Personal Legend, the more that Personal Legend becomes his true reason for being, thought the boy.
11. The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there.
12. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant.
13. One could open a book to any page, or look at a person’s hand; one could turn a card, or watch the flight of the birds…whatever the thing observed, one could find a connection with his experience of the moment. Actually, it wasn’t that those things, in themselves, revealed anything at all; it was just that people, looking at what was occurring around them, could find a means of penetration into the Soul of the World
14. Courage is the quality most essential to understanding the Language of the World
15. You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love.
16. One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.
17. If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.
18. There is only one way to learn…through action.
19. But my heart is agitated…it has dreams, it gets emotional, and it’s become passionate over a woman in the desert. It asks things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights, when I’m thinking about her…
“Well, that’s good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”
20. Naturally it’s afraid that, in pursuing your dream, you might lose everything you’ve won.
21. 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 move toward that dream. That’s the point at which most people give up.
22. 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.
23. Your eyes show the strength of your soul.
24. 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.
25. When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
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