Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

I think that people who live in cultures without quite so much privilege, opportunity or grandiosity have a little bit more respect for the workings of destiny, and the limitations that people can find themselves in through no fault of their own. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Il bel far niente means 'the beauty of doing nothing' ... [it] has always been a cherished Italian ideal. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement. You don't necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Sometimes it's just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

double-pumpin' it" when you have to inhale two desperate gasps of oxygen with every sob. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I was full of a hot, powerful sadness and would have loved to burst into the comfort of tears, but tried hard not to, remembering something my Guru once said
that you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Because often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection). ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I've heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Life goes on, after all, and one must always seek the lesson even through the sorrow. Never remain static; never stop collecting information. And ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Never go into debt to become a writer. Always find other ways to support yourself so you can do the work you truly love for the right reasons. Never ask your art to support you. If you ask your art to support you it will either end up comprised or you'll be disappointed with it. It's a lot to ask of creativity for it to provide for you financially. Find a scrappy way to get by and then do the work you love for the reasons you love. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

His penmanship was shamefully crabbed. Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page. His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I'm far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Only recently, the word scientist had been coined, by the polymath William Whewell. Many scholars had objected to this blunt new term, as it sounded so sinisterly similar to that awful word atheist; why not simply continue to call themselves natural philosophers? Was that designation not more godly, more pure? But divisions were being drawn now between the realm of nature and the realm of philosophy. Ministers who doubled as botanists or geologists were becoming increasingly rare, as far too many challenges to biblical truths were stirred up through investigation of the natural world. 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. As ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Devo farmi le ossa is how they say it in Italian. I need to make my bones. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Which left me with nothing but a dazzled heart and the sense that I live in a most remarkable world, thick with mysteries. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

So this, I believe, is the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

You're wishin' too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

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

Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted - an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore - despite ... ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Despair is a tedious business and quickly becomes repetitive. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

For the entirety of my young and skittish life, I had fixated upon my fear as if it were the most interesting thing about me, when actually it was the most mundane. In fact, my fear was probably the only 100 percent mundane thing about me. I had creativity within me that was original; I had a personality within me that was original; I had dreams and perspectives and aspirations within me that were original. But my fear was not original in the least. My fear wasn't some kind of rare artisanal object; it was just a mass-produced item, available on the shelves of any generic box store. And that's the thing I wanted to build my entire identity around? The most boring instinct I possessed? The panic reflex of my dumbest inner tadpole? No. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

If you don't learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you'll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

THIS IS ME! MY FATHER WAS A GREATER WARRIOR THAN YOUR FATHER! YOU CANNOT EVEN LIFT MY SPEAR ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Marriage is a strange combination of dream and reality, and we spend our lives as couples trying to negotiate that divide. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

So, no, when I mention "tolerance", I'm not talking about learning how to stomach pure awfulness. What I am talking about is learning how to accommodate your life as generously as possible about a basically decent human being who can sometimes be an unmitigated pain in the ass. In this regard, the marital kitchen can become something like a small linoleum temple where we are called up daily to practice forgivenessm as we ourselves would like to be forgiven. Mundane this may be, yes. Devoid of any rock star moments of divine ecstacy, certainly. But maybe such tiny acts of household tolerance are a miracle in some other way - in some quietly measureless way - all the same? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I tell you, Becker," Henry said, "if you make me eat mutton one more night this week, I will have someone shot."
"He doesn't really have people shot," Alma reassured Mr. Pike, under her breath.
"I had figured that," her guest whispered back, "or else I would be dead already. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Own your disappointment, acknowledge it for what it is, and move on. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Where am I getting the brain space to store these words? I'm hoping that maybe my mind has decided to clear out some old negative thoughts and sad memories and replace them with these shiny new words. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Our planet is inhabited not only by animals, and planets, and bacteria, but also ideas. Ideas are a disembodied energetic life-form. They are completely separated from us but capable of interacting with us. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

too many maniacs not enough michelangelos ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

He said, Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But both are equally true. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Someone has to write all those stories: why not me? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise - you can make anything. So please calm down now and get back to work, okay? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I'm an enormous product of my century, I'm a product of my upbringing. I was not aware of the fact that I was entering marriage with the highest set of expectations that humans have ever brought to the institution. It was really good to find that out. It doesn't have to be the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the moon and the stars - it can just be the moon. It's enough that it just can be what it is. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

A sad Italian history of corruption by local leaders and exploitation by foreign dominators, all of which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted. Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

In all of our lives, there are days that we wish we could see expunged from the record of our very existence. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I had creativity within me that was original; I had a personality within me that was original; I had dreams and perspectives and aspirations within me that were original. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I think it's unfortunate that there exists only one path in America to complete social legitimacy, and that is marriage. I think, for instance, that it would be far easier for Americans to elect a black president or a female president than an unmarried president. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I am a better person when I have less on my plate. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

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

The sentences still form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought patterns so well now that they don't bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather endearing - Mr. and Mrs. Yakkity-Yak and their three dumb children, Blah, Blah and Blah. But they don't agitate my home. There's room for all of us in this neighborhood. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Marriage is - among other things - a study in contradiction and disappointment, and inside that reality there is space for us to truly learn how to love. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

These adaptations did not ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

This is what I've found about life, as I've gotten older: you start to lose people, Angela. It's not that there is ever a shortage of people - oh, heavens no. It is merely that - as the years pass - there comes to be a shortage of your people. The ones you loved. The ones who knew the people that you both loved. The ones who know your whole history. Those people start to be plucked away by death, and they are awfully hard to replace after they go. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Because I know something that you don't know. I know that this is the worst experience of your life, but I also know that someday you'll move past it and you'll be fine. And helping somebody likej you through the worst experience of her life is incredibly gratifying. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The flying fish and the diving bird had been netted. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Sometimes out hearts are broken so new light can get in. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I decide every day that I love Creativity enough to accept that Fear will always come with it. And I talk to Fear all the time, speaking to it with love and respect, saying to it: I know that you are Fear, and that your job is to be afraid. And you do your job really well! I will never ask you to leave me alone or to be silent, because you have a right to speak your own voice, and I know that you will never leave me alone or be silent, anyhow. But I need you to understand that I will always choose Creativity over you. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's so funny ... I forgive him everything. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

And experience had already instructed Henry that learning things gave a person advantage over other people ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I wonder if I am capable of being somebody's sun, somebody's everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else's life? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Your treasure - your perfection - is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. The kundalini shakti - the supreme energy of the divine - will take you there. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Is no love which does not become help, taught the theologian Paul Tillich.) ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later - again, for its own mysterious reasons. And a shared private heaven can quickly descend into a failed private hell. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

That is who Barack Obama is - a person of admirable character - and that is who he has remained for me over these last four years. I have not agreed with his every decision, but never once have I seen him break his cool, lose his composure, or abandon his insightful perspective - even during the most serious and/or absurd national disasters. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void and I was looking at the void, all at the same time. The void was a place of limitless peace and wisdom, The void was conscious and intelligent. The void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way - not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God's thigh muscle. I just was part of God. In addition to being God. I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe. ("All know that the drop merges into ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop," wrote the sage Kabir - and I can personally attest now that this is true.)
It wasn't hallucinogenic, what I was feeling. It was the most basic of events. It was heaven, yes. It was the deepest love I'd ever experienced, beyond anything I could previously imagined, but it wasn't euphoric. It wasn't exciting. There wasn't enough ego or passion left in me to create euphoria and excitement. It was just obvious. Like when you've been looking at an optical illusion for a long time, straining your eyes to decode the trick, and suddenly your cognizance shifts and there - now you can clearly see it! - the two vases are actually two faces. And once you've seen through the opt ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Good morning, Mr. Herbert!" I would say.
The point is debatable," he might respond.
Or, on another day: "Good morning, Mr. Herbert!"
"I will half allow it."
Or: "Good morning, Mr. Herbert!"
"I fail to see your argument."
Or: "Good morning, Mr. Herbert!"
"I find myself unequal to the occasion."
Or, my favorite ever: "Good morning, Mr. Herbert!"
"Oh, you're a satirist now, are you? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I am determined to make the most of this life that I have, damn it - it's that kind of stubbornness I think we all need more of. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

It might have been done before, but it hasn't been done by you! ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

He became as close to me as my own, beautiful, random, and real family.
Love like that is a deep well, with steep sides.
Once you fall in, that's it - you will love that person always ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Most of all, I can choose my thoughts. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Tis' better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else's perfectly. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Just because creativity is mystical doesn't mean it shouldn't also be demystified - especially if it means liberating artists from the confines of their own grandiosity, panic, and ego. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The hero's journey is simply who we are as human beings ... ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

One instant, you're just a regular Joe, schlepping through your mundane life, and then suddenly - what is this? - nothing has changed, yet you feel stirred by a grace, swollen with wonder, overflowing with bliss. Everything - for no reason whatsoever - is perfect. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being
and a normal one, at that? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

You have been to hell, Ketut?"
He smiled. Of course he's been there.
What's it like in hell?"
Same like in heaven," he said.
He saw my confusion and tried to explain. "Universe is a circle, Liss."
He said. "To up, to down
all same, at end."
I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below.
I asked. "Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?"
Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss." He laughed.
Same-same," he said. "Same in end, so better to be happy in journey."
I said, "So, if heaven is love, then hell is.. "
Love, too," he said.
Ketut laughed again, "Always so difficult for young people to understand this! ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Medicating the symptom of any illness without exploring its root cause is just a classically hare-brained Western way to think that anyone could ever get truly better. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Divine Time, Geological Time, Human Time, Moss Time. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Whenever I got those rejection letters, then, I would permit my ego to say aloud to whoever had signed it: You think you can scare me off? I've got another eighty years to wear you down! There are people who haven't even been born yet who are gonna reject me someday - that's how long I plan to stick around. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

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

You don't need to conduct autopsies on your disasters. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

At that moment of realization (that union with God is always present), that's when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last compassionate, unspoken message:
You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Think of the many articles one can find every year in the Wall Street Journal describing some entrepreneur or businessman as being a "pioneer" or a "maverick" or a "cowboy." Think of the many times these ambitious modern men are described as "staking their claim" or boldly pushing themselves "beyond the frontier" or even "riding into the sunset." We still use this nineteenth-century lexicon to describe our boldest citizens, but it's really a code now, because these guys aren't actually pioneers; they are talented computer programmers, biogenetic researchers, politicians, or media monguls making a big splash in a fast modern economy.

But when Eustace Conway talks about staking a claim, the guy is literally staking a goddamn claim. Other frontier expressions that the rest of us use as metaphors, Eustace uses literally. He does sit tall in the saddle; he does keep his powder dry; he is carving out a homestead. When he talks about reining in horses or calling off the dogs or mending fences, you can be sure that there are real horses, real dogs or real fences in the picture. And when Eustace goes in for the kill, he's not talking about a hostile takeover of a rival company; he's talking about really killing something. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

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

Your art not only doesn't have to be original, in other words; it also doesn't have to be important. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I rail a lot against passion, because I feel like passion can be very exclusionary, and very elitist, and it can leave a lot of people feeling like they don't belong... I'm much more interested in allowing people to follow curiosity, which is a much more gentle impulse that doesn't require that you sacrifice your entire life for something. It's more of kind of a scavenger hunt, where you're allowed to pick up these tiny beautiful little clues along the pathway. It's more of a tap on the shoulder that asks you to turn your attention one inch to the left. Oh that's a little bit mildly interesting - what is that? Okay now I'm going to take that clue... I'm going to take it another inch, and I'm going to take it another inch. Rather than this idea that the symphony is born whole, because you sit down and you're struck by lightening and then you start to create. Curiosity I think, is a far more friendly way to do creativity than passion."

...this is why I say the path of curiosity is the scavenger hunt, because it took my probably three years between "gee it would be nice to put some plants in my backyard" to here I am in the South Pacific exploring the history of moss and inventing this giant novel. You know I think everybody thinks that creativity comes in lightening strikes, but I think it comes with whispers. And then the whispers can grow thunderous over time if you are patient enough to explore it, almost in the way that a scientist would.

Be open to - ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Love over suffering, always. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The rules of transcendence insist that you will not advance even one inch closer to divinity as long as you cling to even one last seductive thread of blame. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds it endearing and encouraging that a legendary Roman philosopher had to reassure himself that it's okay not to be Plato. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Unfenced by law, the unmarried lover can quit a bad relationship at any time. But you - the legally married person who wants to escape doomed love - may soon discover that a significant portion of your marriage contract belongs to the State, and that it sometimes takes a very long while for the State to grant you your leave. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Power is a neutral energy source, like tofu. It's what you do with it that gives it flavor. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

It's also important to read the newspaper every day to see how the pope is doing. Here in Rome, the pope's health is recorded daily in the newspaper, very much like weather, or the TV schedule. Today the pope is tired. Yesterday, the pope was less tired than he is today. Tomorrow, we expect that the pope will not be so tired as he was today. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert