Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

258 Sourced Quotes

If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance.

Elizabeth Gilbert
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

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

Elizabeth Gilbert
Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia. Just for a few days!

Elizabeth Gilbert
Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.

Elizabeth Gilbert
In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years — I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

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
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
It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.

Elizabeth Gilbert
It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted.

Elizabeth Gilbert
The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

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