Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

258 Sourced Quotes

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.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness

Elizabeth Gilbert
You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos-the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path. Nobody stopped her. She was a comet. She did not know that she was not flying.

Elizabeth Gilbert
You must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.

Elizabeth Gilbert
This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I'd only ever experienced love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?

Elizabeth Gilbert
He is only happy when he can maintain himself - mentally and spiritually - at the intersection between a vertical line and horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For this, he needs to know where he is located every moment, both in his relationship to the divine and to his family here on earth. If he loses that balance, he loses his power.

Elizabeth Gilbert
This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Well, just remember—all your misery will be waiting for you at the door upon your exit, should you care to pick it up again when you leave.

Elizabeth Gilbert
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.

Elizabeth Gilbert
The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.

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.

Elizabeth Gilbert
It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainment.

Elizabeth Gilbert
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.

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

Elizabeth Gilbert
Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Soon you start craving that intense attention with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld you probably turn sick, crazy and depleted not to mention resentful of the dealer who encourage this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore despite that you know that he has it hidden somewhere God dammit because you know that he used to give it to you for free.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Whatever this feeling is - this is what I have been praying for. And this is also what I have been praying to.

Elizabeth Gilbert
They flank me - depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don't need to show their badges. I know these guys very well.... Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that.

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
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

Elizabeth Gilbert
To show a longing for anything that one cannot have, for instance, is not a clever position.

Elizabeth Gilbert
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
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
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
I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Traveling is the great true love of my life... I am loyal and constant in my love of travel. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby - I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me.

Elizabeth Gilbert
I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

Elizabeth Gilbert
The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.

Elizabeth Gilbert