Elizabeth Gilbert - Happiness Quotes

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I wondered, "Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?

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. 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.

Elizabeth Gilbert
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
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 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
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
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.

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