Top 10 Most Famous Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (BEST)
To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
If life gives you lemons, don’t settle for simply making lemonade – make a glorious scene at a lemonade stand.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
There’s a crack (or cracks) in everyone… that’s how the light of God gets in.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Inspirational Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes about Life and Love
In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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
Real, sane, mature love is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people; it’s also a political and economic contract of the highest order.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Love is like that is a deep well with steep sides. Once you fall in, that’s it. You will love that person always.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship – a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with… I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
‘Eat Pray Love’ Quotes By Elizabeth Gilbert
A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Om Namah Shivaya, meaning, I honor the divinity that resides within me.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
We call it ‘dolce far niente’, the sweetness of doing nothing.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
So, miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Maybe you’re a woman in search of her word.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
At some point […], you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship – a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Look for God. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you… There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
We must take care of our families, wherever we find them.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
You cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predictable of calamities.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
As an old friend of mine once told me, you can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Do not look at the world through your head; look at it through your heart.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
A poor man goes to church every day and prays in front of a statue of a great saint, begging: Dear Saint, please please please, let me win the lottery! Finally, one day, the exasperated statue of the Saint comes to life, looks down upon the man and says: My son, please please please, buy a ticket!
— Elizabeth Gilbert
We all want things to stay the same, settle for living in misery because we’re afraid of change.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
More Best Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes
I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Creativity itself doesn’t care at all about results – the only thing it craves is the process. Learn to love the process and let whatever happens next happen, without fussing too much about it. Work like a monk, or a mule, or some other representative metaphor for diligence. Love the work. Destiny will do what it wants with you, regardless.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
There were times, especially when I was traveling for ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ when, I swear to God, I would feel this weight of my female ancestors, all those Swedish farmwives from beyond the grave who were like, ‘Go! Go to Naples! Eat more pizza! Go to India, ride an elephant! Do it! Swim in the Indian Ocean. Read those books. Learn a language.’
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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
My career started young and I was really ambitious, and then I had success and I hung out with people who were much older. I think I might have been temporally misplaced, so I thought I was 40. It was a premature midlife crisis.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
My writing practice taught me the important thing is steadfastness. It’s not necessarily discipline. Discipline can become a prison. When your spiritual practices become another thing for you to be anxious about, they’ve lost their usefulness.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Childlessness doesn’t make people selfish; selfishness makes people selfish.
— 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
I think a lot of people who feel as though they desperately want to be married oftentimes simply desperately want to have a wedding.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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
These days I settle for feeling only 85 percent sure about most things, most of the time. I believe this is keeping me sane, and I also believe that it’s keeping me human. In fact, I’m 85 percent sure of it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I’ve always considered myself lucky that I do not have many passions. There’s only one pursuit that I have ever truly loved, and that pursuit is writing. This means, conveniently enough, that I never had to search for my destiny; I only had to obey it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
When I lost my friends, it was because I had used the power of giving on them recklessly. I swept into their lives with my big fat checkbook, and I erased years of obstacles for them overnight – but sometimes, in the process, I also accidentally erased years of dignity.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
You know, why at the end of your life should you assemble thousands of pages of ‘Why am I so sad, why am I so depressed?’ Instead, assemble thousands of pages of why you’re so content.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I am far more of a loner than people would imagine. But I am the most gregarious and socially interactive loner you ever met. The thing is, I am fascinated by people’s stories and I’m very talkative and can’t ever say no to anything or anyone, so I tend to over-socialize, to give away too much of my time to the many people I adore.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I think sometimes we look at other people’s marriages and we think they must always be so happy together. I don’t know anybody who’s married for a long time who hasn’t somehow made room in their love story for the hate and resentment that they sometimes feel toward each other.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
It’s not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn’t have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn’t have much to do with reality.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall,’ which blew the top of my head straight off. I’ve read it three times, and I’m still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
But when it comes to writing the thing that I’ve sort of been thinking about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Sanity and clarity are more important for me and I’m willing to give up a lot of shimmer for it. I’m willing to have more boring friends, who are sane.
— 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
I have a rigid self-accountability. You have to work hard.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I used to say, ‘Man, I think I’d be a really good dad. I’ll be a great provider. I’m funny; I’ll go on trips with them – I’ll do all sorts of stuff.’ But the momming? I’m not made for that. I have a really good mom; I know what she put into it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Despite having written five books, I worry that I have not written the right kinds of books, or that perhaps I have dedicated too much of my life to writing, and have therefore neglected other aspects of my being.
— 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
Every few years, I think, ‘Maybe now I’m finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand ‘Ulysses.’ So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I’m like, ‘What the hell?’
— Elizabeth Gilbert
If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I’m a pleaser. That’s my character.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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
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
Part of the elasticity that you need, in order to continue to try to create, is the foregone conclusion that not all of it is going to be fabulously successful. But it’s all going to be part of a long lifetime body of experimentation.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
If life gives you lemons, don’t settle for simply making lemonade – make a glorious scene at a lemonade stand.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I was a bartender for a long time, so I know how to make drinks, but I’m more likely to offer them than to have them. I think this is one of the reasons why I get to live longer than my great-grandmother did, and why I get to produce more writing than she did, and why my marriage isn’t in dire straits.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Oh, I just want what we all want: a comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence and alter my thinking forever.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I should just put it bluntly, because we’re all sort of friends here now – it’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Oh, so Jesus, what a thought! You know that’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o’clock in the morning, and I don’t want to go there.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
When somebody has an enormous success in this culture, people start asking two questions, which are ‘What are you doing now?’ and ‘How are you going to beat that?’ And I have to say, I love the assumption that your intention is to beat yourself constantly – that you’re in battle against yourself.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Absolute certainty is not something I strive for anymore. I’ve learned the hard way that destiny usually looks upon our most strident convictions with amusement, or perhaps even pity.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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
My husband is not American. He was born in Brazil, where he grew up under a filthy, corrupt dictatorship. In his twenties, he moved to Europe, where he lived for a while under various socialist democracies. He spent a few years on a kibbutz in Israel, living out a utopian experiment in communal existence.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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
When I diagnose my depression now, I think it was partially about saying goodbye to these kids that I always expected to have but already knew that I wouldn’t.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I was a writer before ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ and I’ll be a writer after it’s over. It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
There’s no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can’t put your feet up on it and a dog can’t jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I’ve always been afraid of saying no to people because I don’t want them to be disappointed and dislike me.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Here’s the thing: the unit of reverence in Europe is the family, which is why a child born today of unmarried parents in Sweden has a better chance of growing up in a house with both of his parents than a child born to a married couple in America. Here we revere the couple, there they revere the family.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I feel like there are women who are genuinely born to be mothers, and women who are born to be aunties, and women who really probably not should be allowed near children. The tragedy that happens is when any one of those women ends up in the wrong category.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I push every day against forces that say you have to go faster, be more effective, be more productive, you have to constantly outdo yourself, you have to constantly outdo your neighbor – all of the stuff that creates an incredibly productive society, but also a very neurotic one.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
If I could read while I was driving, showering, socializing or sleeping, I would do it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can’t find me and I can spend all day reading or walking all alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one my most favorite possible things to be.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Which is – you know, like check it out, I’m pretty young, I’m only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it’s exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right?
— Elizabeth Gilbert
But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome – people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn’t always hold.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
If you are given only one opportunity to speak, be certain your voice is heard.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Listen – of course money changes everything, but so does sunlight, and so does food: These are powerful but neutral energy sources, neither inherently good nor evil but shaped only by the way we use them.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I have these new policies toward my life, like ‘I will not accelerate when I see the yellow light.’
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Now, if you are like me – if you are like practically anybody in America – then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French, based upon movies, rumors, recent headlines, unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters, or… you know… all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I have no business being a journalist. I’m the least, I’m the least – I’m the most trusting, I absolutely make a habit of believing anything that anybody tells me about themselves. I’ve never had any reason in the world to think that anyone has wanted to harm me, or lie to me. I believe whatever is being sold, most of the time.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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
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
Men go into marriage with virtually no expectations whatsoever. Ten years later, the men are delightfully surprised to find out that it’s actually kind of nice, and the women have sort of had to take a nose dive from what they thought it was going to be.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Mine is just a simple old human story – of one person trying, with great rigor and discipline, to comprehend her personal relationship with divinity.
— 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
I don’t think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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
I think it’s wonderful when a love story begins with a great deal of romance and affection, passion and excitement, that’s how it should be. But I don’t necessarily know that it’s the wisest thing in the world to expect that it ends there, or that it should, 30 years down the road, still look as it did on the night of your first kiss.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I consider a good dinner party at our house to be where people drink and eat more than they’re meant to. My husband is a really fantastic cook. His mother is Italian and if you walk into our house, we assume you’re starving.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
We set up one rule in our house, which is, ‘Guests of guests cannot bring guests.’ That rule was required because that happened one weekend, and we finally said, ‘Okay, you know what? That’s a little too much.’
— Elizabeth Gilbert
I’ve come to realize that the contemporary creative culture is not generating the best possible outcome.
— 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