This has sometimes been paraphrased: "The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them."
Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 15.
“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”
—
Paulo Coelho
,
book
The Alchemist
Variant: simple things are the most valuable and only wise people appreciate them".
Source: The Alchemist
Last update Oct. 29, 2021.
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Paulo Coelho 844
Brazilian lyricist and novelist 1947Related quotes
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“Sometimes simple things are the most difficult things to achieve.”
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“Simple and complicated, as most true things are.”
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“We know only fragmentarily this extraordinary thing called life”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher
Vol. XI, p. 288
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works
Context: We know only fragmentarily this extraordinary thing called life; we have never looked at sorrow, except through the screen of escapes; we have never seen the beauty, the immensity of death, and we know it only through fear and sadness. There can be understanding of life, and of the significance and beauty of death, only when the mind on the instant perceives “what is”. You know, sirs, although we differentiate them, love, death, and sorrow are all the same; because, surely, love, death, and sorrow are the unknowable. The moment you know love, you have ceased to love. Love is beyond time; it has no beginning and no end, whereas knowledge has; and when you say, “I know what love is”, you don’t. You know only a sensation, a stimulus. You know the reaction to love, but that reaction is not love. In the same way, you don’t know what death is. You know only the reactions to death, and you will discover the full depth and significance of death only when the reactions have ceased.
Octavio Paz
(1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature
Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 2
Context: It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life? To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches — this may be a program for life. <!-- But the bright spot is no longer an oval pool but an incandescent triangle, traversed by very fine flutings of shadow. The triangle stirs almost imperceptibly, until little by little a luminous boiling takes place, at the outer edges first, and then, with increasing fury, in its fiery center, as if all this liquid light were a seething substance gradually becoming yellower and yellower. Will it explode? The bubbles continually flare up and die away, in a rhythm resembling that of panting breath. As the sky grows darker, the bright patch of light dims and begins to flicker; it might almost be a lamp about to go out amid turbulent shadows. The trees remain exactly where they were, although they are now clad in another light.
