Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

258 Sourced Quotes

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.

Elizabeth Gilbert
We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses—one foot is on the horse called "fate," the other on the horse called "free will." And the question you have to ask every day is—which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it's not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?

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. 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.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying "Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.

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

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

Elizabeth Gilbert
Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

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

Elizabeth Gilbert
I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life..what happened was that I started to pray.

Elizabeth Gilbert
If I'd had any way of knowing that things were- as Lily Tomlin once said- going to get a whole lot worse before they got worse, I'm not sure how I would have slept that night.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Once Henry had heard a crying noise at sea, and had seen a mermaid floating on the ocean's surface. The mermaid had been injured by a shark. Henry had pulled the mermaid out of the water with a rope, and she had died in his arms..."what language did the mermaid speak?" Alma wanted to know, imagining that it like almost have to be Greek. "English!" Henry said. "By God, plum, why would I rescue a deuced foreign mermaid?

Elizabeth Gilbert
He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Well, I always tried to look nice and be feminine even in the worst tragedies and crisis, there's no reason to add to everyone's misery by looking miserable yourself. That's my philosophy. This is why I always wore makeup and jewelry into the jungle-nothing too extravagant, but maybe just a nice gold bracelet and some earrings, a little lipstick, good perfume. Just enough to show that I still had my self-respect.

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

Elizabeth Gilbert
A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?

Elizabeth Gilbert
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.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Then again, 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 predicatable of calamities.

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
The act of quiet nighttime talking illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.

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

Elizabeth Gilbert
The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship - just so long as those prayers are sincere.

Elizabeth Gilbert
For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.

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

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

Elizabeth Gilbert
I'm so excited about school. I'm such a shameless student. I laid my clothes out last night, just like I did before my first day of first grade, with my patent leather shoes and my new lunch box. I hope the teacher will like me :)

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

Elizabeth Gilbert
He was still my romantic hero and I was still his living dream

Elizabeth Gilbert