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The Alchemist is an allegorical novel by Paulo Coelho first published in 1988. The Alchemist was originally written in Portuguese. It has sold more than 65 million copies in more than 150 countries, becoming one of the best-selling books in history. The Alchemist details the journey of an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago. Santiago, believing a recurring dream to be prophetic, decides to travel to the pyramids of Egypt to find treasure. On the way, he encounters love, danger, opportunity, disaster and learns a lot about himself and the ways of the world. One of the significant characters that he meets is an old king who tells him about discovering his personal legend: what he always wanted to accomplish in his life. And that "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." This is the core philosophy and motto of the book. Excerpts from the foreword by Paulo Coelho : What is a personal calling? It is God's blessing...

The ego is the worst confidence trickster we could ever figure or imagine because you don't see it. The problem is that the ego hides in the last place that you'd ever look within itself. It disguises its thoughts as your thoughts, its feelings as your feelings. People's need to protect their own egos knows no bounds. They will lie, cheat, steal, kill, do whatever it takes to maintain what we call ego boundaries. People have no clue that they're imprisoned. They don't know that there is an ego, they don't know the distinction. At first, it's difficult for the mind to accept that there's something beyond itself, that there's something of greater value and greater capacity for discerning truth than itself. In religion, the ego manifests as the devil. And of course no one realizes how smart the ego is, because it created the devil so you could blame someone else. In creating this imaginary external enemy, it usually made a real enemy for ourselves, a...