Top 100 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes
#1. When I look at my life and the lives of my female friends these days - with our dizzying number of opportunities and talents - I sometimes feel as though we are all mice in a giant experimental maze, scurrying around frantically, trying to find our way through.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#2. Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it's more like love's shady second cousin who's always borrowing money and can't hold down a job.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#3. And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#4. The often surprising results of that hunt - that's what I call Big Magic.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#5. Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#6. If we never leave our house except to drive to work, do we need to be even remotely aware of this powerful, humbling, extraordinary and eternal life force that surges and ebbs around us all the time? Apparently not. Because we have stopped paying attention.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#8. That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#9. Bless his heart, Giovanni doesn't try to put a reassuring arm around me, nor does he express the slightest discomfort about my explosion of sadness. Instead, he just sits through my tears in silence, until I've calmed down.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#10. There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one. The universe will shift, destiny's molecules will get themselves organized and your path will soon intersect with the path of the master you need.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#11. I've spent my entire life chasing wonder, and to me that word is synonymous with spirituality.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#12. You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#13. Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody - really want him - it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#14. Interesting outcomes, after all, are just awful outcomes with the volume of drama turned way down. I
Elizabeth Gilbert
#15. Inspiration is allowed to do whatever it wants to, in fact, and it is never obliged to justify its motives to any of us.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#16. What I think is amazing is not that 85% of people who get married under the age of 25 get divorced, it's that 15% of them stay together. How did they manage to pull that off? You almost can't wait too long. It's the single simplest measure to predict divorce.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#17. Your art not only doesn't have to be original, in other words; it also doesn't have to be important.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#18. The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#19. My whole life I've been an over-giver. My general operating policy has always been, 'If it belongs to me, don't worry: You can have it!'
Elizabeth Gilbert
#20. Because either way, it's all kind of amazing - what we get to do, what we get to attempt, what we sometimes get to commune with.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#21. A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#22. Learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job o fa creative person ... Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#23. You have to work ceaselessly on your end to digest and imbibe your opportunities or, I have come to believe, they will gradually slip away and knock on someone else's more receptive door.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#24. I've come to realize that the contemporary creative culture is not generating the best possible outcome.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#25. I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work - one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go of the results. Not going to war against anyone else, or against their talents, or against themselves.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#26. I had a great teacher in India who said to me, 'If you think you're spiritual and evolved and enlightened, go home for Christmas.'
Elizabeth Gilbert
#27. You are here and you are allowed to be here and therefore you are allowed to make decisions about yourself and the people in your life; rather than sort of backing up and making sure it's okay with everybody at every turn.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#28. What all couples have ever wanted, a little bit of privacy in which to practice all manners of love.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#29. I am going to spend as much time as I can creating delightful things out of my existence, because that's what brings me awake and that's what brings me alive. I
Elizabeth Gilbert
#30. Parvati and Shiva are the divine embodiment of creativity (the feminine) and consciousness (the masculine). She is the generative energy of the universe; he is its formless wisdom. Whatever
Elizabeth Gilbert
#33. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, ... The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#34. Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#35. What happens and what you encounter, what you collide with - it's so exciting and revealing about how much more interesting and tricky the universe is than we think in our daily lives.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#36. And when I pray, I shall ask the Lord in heaven whatever happened to my father's ethics - or did he never have any?"
Henry leapt to his feet and pounded both fists on his desk in rage.
"You little idiot!" he roared. "I never had any!
Elizabeth Gilbert
#37. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#38. The less you indulge yourself now, the more you can indulge yourself in the future, when you have made your fortune.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#39. A parent is inexcusable who does not personally teach her child to think.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#40. Immanuel Kant believed that we humans, because we are so emotionally complex, go through two puberties in life. The first puberty is when our bodies become mature enough for sex; the second puberty is when our minds becomes mature enough for sex.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#42. For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#43. It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#44. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you. The
Elizabeth Gilbert
#47. Most important, though, I had to wait until I found the perfect traveling/eating/drinking/napping companion. And I did finally find him, two years ago - my Brazilian-born, French-speaking, wine-worshipping, tripe-consuming, uncomplaining traveler of a sweetheart.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#48. Even in the worst tragedies and crisis, there's no reason to add to everyone's misery by looking miserable yourself.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#50. There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. 'How much do you love me?' And, 'Who's in charge?' Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#51. A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#52. Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#53. If I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something
Elizabeth Gilbert
#54. Creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience).
Elizabeth Gilbert
#55. I think there's more real in the unreal than there is in the real.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#56. If faith were rational , it wouldn't be -by definition- faith.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#58. The men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#59. Remember that you're nothing but a beginner - even if you've been working on your craft for fifty years. We are all just beginner here, and we shall all die beginners. So let it go.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#60. I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the 'monkey mind'
the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#61. I believe that inspiration will always try its best to work with you - but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#63. I am openly prideful, secretly judgemental, and cowardly in conflict.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#64. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say - no detail spared in the quest for perfection.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#66. The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not the be believed.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#68. I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#69. Real, sane, mature love - the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school - is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#71. I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#72. It matters./It doesn't matter. Build space in your head for this paradox. Build as much space for it as you can. Build even more space. You will need it. And then go deep within that space - as far in as you can possibly go - and make absolutely whatever you want to make. It's
Elizabeth Gilbert
#73. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#74. The emergency that always gets you in the end is the one you didn't prepare for.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#75. Nobody until very recently would have thought that their husband was supposed to be their best friend, confidante, intellectual soul mate, co-parent, inspiration.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#76. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#77. Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender
Elizabeth Gilbert
#78. You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for your work.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#79. Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#80. The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#81. I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#82. There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#83. It used to be that god was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#84. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. If you are appalled, he said, then it was a devil who had visited you. If you feel lightened, it was an angel.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#85. Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#86. I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#87. And then, in that regal silence, finally - I began to meditate on (and with) God.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#88. There is a hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#89. During my first few weeks in Italy, all my Protestant synapses were zinging in distress, looking for a task. I wanted to take on pleasure like a homework assignment, or a giant science fair project.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#90. You know, it's a funny thing. The only Romance language Felipe doesn't happen to speak is Italian. But I go ahead and say it to him anyway, just as we're about to jump.
I say: 'Attraversiamo.'
Let's cross over.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#91. Childlessness doesn't make people selfish; selfishness makes people selfish.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#93. All the parts of us that we ever were are always going to be with us. You make space to carry them and you just try not to let them drive. But you can't chuck them out either.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#95. But she was old, and old women do tend to get pushed aside at big gatherings - even when they have footed the bill for that gathering.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#96. Lastly, she knew one other thing, and this was the most important realization of all: she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact. This
Elizabeth Gilbert
#97. This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)
Elizabeth Gilbert
#98. Any motion whatsoever beats inertia, because inspiration will always be drawn to motion.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#99. When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don't know when you'll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#100. Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years
I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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