Quotes from book
The Zahir

Name: The Zahir
Author: Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho Original title O Zahir (Portuguese, 2005)

The Zahir is a 2005 novel by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho. As in an earlier book, The Alchemist, The Zahir is about a pilgrimage. The book touches on themes of love, loss and obsession.

“Stop being yourself and become who u always wanted to be”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Variant: Stop being who you were and become who you are.
Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 215.

“The wise are wise only because they love.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

As quoted in Elders on Love: Dialogues on the Consciousness, Cultivation, and Expression of Love (1999) by Kenneth R. Lakritz and Thomas M. Knoblauch.
Unsourced variant: The wise are wise only because they love. The fools are fools only because they think they can understand love.
Variant: The wise are wise only because they love.
Source: The Zahir

“That's how love got lost… when we started laying down rules for when love should or shouldn't appear.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir

“In my world, everything is possible and everything is relative.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 167.

“A brush with death always helps us to live our lives better.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 220.

“You want to know if the heart of a man or a woman can contain enough love for more than one person? … I think it's perfectly possible as long as one of those people doesn’t turn into … a Zahir.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 128.

“That’s the problem, we do get used to things.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 226.

“They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 205.
Context: Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.

“I learned something recently: our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 65.
Context: I learned something recently: our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with their sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their miserable lives...

“I was once more in a time which the things around me were changing and that is how I wanted it to be for the rest of my days.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 272.
Context: That is how I would have acted before my accident, but now my personal history had become unimportant. It had stopped being history and was once more becoming a legend, a search, an adventure, a journey into and away from myself. I was once more in a time which the things around me were changing and that is how I wanted it to be for the rest of my days.