125 Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

I believe in a magnificent God. (Quote Meaning)

eventually, everything goes away. (Meaning)

Let your conscience be your guide. (Quote Meaning)

You have no idea how strong my love is! (Meaning)

Embrace the beautiful mess that you are. (Quote Meaning)

There's nothing special about your fear. (Meaning)

to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. (Quote Meaning)

If you're alive, you're a creative person. (Meaning)

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traveling is the great true love of my life (Quote Meaning)

The love that moves the sun and the other stars. (Meaning)

Desperate love is always the toughest way to do it. (Quote Meaning)

Someone has to write all those stories: why not me? (Meaning)

The hero's journey is simply who we are as human beings. (Quote Meaning)

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in. (Meaning)

You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. (Quote Meaning)

There's a crack (or cracks) in everyone...that's how the light of God gets in. (Meaning)

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. (Quote Meaning)

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The women whom I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because stuff worked out. They got that way because stuff went wrong and they handled it. (Meaning)

Done is better than good. (Quote Meaning)

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.

I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit. (Meaning)

Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be. (Quote Meaning)

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.

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. (Meaning)

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. (Quote Meaning)

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. 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 select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. 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.

There's always another level up. There's always another ascension. More grace, more light, more generosity, more compassion, more to shed, more to grow.

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. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And 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.

This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something. (Meaning)

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. (Quote Meaning)

If you're going to answer the call and you're going to transform and you're going to change, get ready. It is not a day at the beach.

Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.

Being content with what you have already is an art form that leads to a peace that can’t be replaced by anything else.

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. (Meaning)

There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.

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.

Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. (Quote Meaning)

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.

we must take care of our families wherever we find them. (Meaning)

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with.

What are you willing to give up, in order to become who you really need to be?

Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.

We all want things to stay the same. Settle for living in misery because we are afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins.

Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation. (Quote Meaning)

Balance is not letting anyone love you less than you love yourself.

The world is like a dropped pie most of the time. Don't kill yourself trying to put it back together. Just grab a fork and eat some of it off the floor. Then carry on.

At some point, you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.

I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent–and working at a pace so slow–that I would be able to hear myself living.

Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy.

Everything good I've ever gotten in life, I only got because I gave something else up.

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous. (Meaning)

So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

God dwells within you, as you. (Quote Meaning)

Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine. You want to stay near the core of the thing - right in the hub of the wheel - not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness - that's your heart. That's where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you'll always find peace.

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

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.

This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.

To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.

Creativity does not belong exclusively to professional artists and geniuses; it is the birthright of every single human being. Creativity is our common heritage. You don’t need to quit your job and move to Paris in order to lay claim to this heritage - all you have to do is clear some space in your life for whimsy, invention, sensory pleasure, and play. Most of all, you have to learn how to follow your curiosity more than your fear.

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.

There is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.

In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. 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.

In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a codega--a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets.

The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.

You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.

[Saint Anthony] said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. 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.

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

I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Success isn't about acquiring things, it's about discovering your life purpose and following the call

Your fear is the most boring thing about you.

When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.

But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with think, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.

I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine.

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.

We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.

Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it's not something where-if you missed it by age 19-you're finished. It's never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world-at any age. At least try.

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.

Mistakes will be made. Failure will occur. You pick yourself up and carry on.

Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

a woman's place is in the kitchen...sitting in a comfortable chair, with her feet up, drinking a glass of wine and watching her husband cook dinner.

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

This is a nice metaphor, too, about mothers and daughters - that when it came time for me to make my own, I was making a completely different garden than the one that my mom has. They don't look like they came from relatives. Hers is a very productive and pragmatic vegetable garden, and mine is a ridiculous overabundance of useless plants. It doesn't feed anybody, it doesn't serve any purpose.

You might get nothing out of it at all except a beautiful, long life where all you did was follow your gorgeous curiosity. And that should be enough too.

Take care of the problems now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you scew everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering - that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understand - there's where you'll find heaven.

I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.

God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.

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.

Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true.

Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself.

According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. this is why we all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile--just for the chance to experience this infinite love. And once you have found this divinity within, can you hold it? Because if you can...bliss.

I never wanted to be the person that waited for a stranger to come to town - I wanted to be the stranger.

You know the old adage: Plant an expectation, reap a disappointment.

God wants us to be in joy, God wants us to be happy.

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. Your treasure--your perfection--is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. (Meaning)

Nothing is less efficient than perfectionism.

But if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.

the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer

The best we can do then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally - no matter what insanity is transpiring out there.

Embrace the glorious mess that you are (Quote Meaning)

The Bhagavad Gita—that ancient Indian Yogic text—says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

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.

We all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We're not destroyed by it. We endure and go on to do interesting things and have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us. That's a kind of personal story of mine that I don't think I would tell in memoir but I do think I can tell in fiction.

Problem is, you can’t accept that his relationship had a real short shelf life. You’re like a dog at the dump, baby – you’re just lickin’ at the empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you’re not careful, that can’s gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it.” “But I love him.” “So love him.” “But I miss him.” “So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it.

When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.

The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.

Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark.

People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other's personalities. Who wouldn't? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that's not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner's faults honestly and say, 'I can work around that. I can make something out of it.'? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it's always going to pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.

There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.

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.

When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It's safe. Let go.

My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?

I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker," he continued, as though he had not heard her. "We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.

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 they are both equally true.

Watch for the people whose eyes light up when you talk about your dream. Those are the people you keep.

I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.

You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.

As for discipline—it's important, but sort of overrated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.

I think I deserve something beautiful.

Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak.

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

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No? It’s because he doesn’t care! He’s in a room with a naked girl, he just won the lottery

Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character.

I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check.

The only boring people I know are bored people.

Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

The six elements of her Fail Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: "Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.

And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?

Take me someplace where we can be silent together.

Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch--there's not a chance.

When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost.

True power comes from standing in your own truth and walking your own path.

Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed.

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.

To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business-not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into... rhetoric and plot.

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?

Women are capable of enduring a tremendous amount of disappointment and still have a good life.

the health of the planet is affected by the health of every individual on it !

You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.

Fear can have a voice, but it doesn't get a vote.

When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally get the picture: that we are only given one dazzling moment of life here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our brief but intrinsic participation with it.

Lay your wishes aside for a spell, and look deep into what you believe about yourself. Make sure your beliefs about your own life are anchored in greatness, in holiness, in worth, in grace, in joy, in excitement -in internal certainties rather than external circumstances. Because that belief? That's where you're heading, no matter what it may look like on the outside.

You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.

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.

Nobody's really paying that much attention to your massive personal dramas.

What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?

too many maniacs not enough michelangelos.

Sometimes beauty needs a bit of ignoring, to properly come into being.

But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort.