391 Inspiring Quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

You can butcher the sheep only once. But if you are careful, you can shear the sheep every year.

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

When I don't know what I'm doing, I look like I don't know what I'm doing. When I'm excited or nervous, I look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost.

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.

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

Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.

I feel like if I were to get another tattoo, it would probably be those two words. Just stubborn, stubborn, stubborn gladness.

Most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.

We can't just follow Paris for the sake of Paris.

Fear -- who cares?

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

One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

Bhuta ia, dewa ia. (Bali expression meaning Man is a demon, man is a god.).

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.

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?

Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

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

It's an honor to be in grief. It's an honor to feel that much, to have loved that much.

Creativity is a crushing chore and a glorious mystery. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.

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.

He was powerful and I died of love in his shadow.

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

I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.

You start whenever you decide to start.

I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights but also devote myself to God.

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

Nothing is so essential as dignity…Time will reveal who has it and who has it not.

Change is all about motion, motion is all about uncertainty and we are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Don't rush through the experiences and circumstances that have the most capacity to transform you.

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

I'm still aspiring to be a better and better person, but I think that disappointments have made me gentler with other people and their disappointments, the stuff that they have to carry around and endure.

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.

Life's metaphors are God's instructions.

That's your friend. My husband is my best friend. He's not the mirror that holds up my flaws. He's just the guy who's like, 'I think you're terrific'... It's just simple, showing up for each other.

These days I settle for feeling only 85 percent sure about most things, most of the time. I believe this is keeping me sane, and I also believe that it's keeping me human. In fact, I'm 85 percent sure of it.

Go back to bed so that, when the tempest comes, you'll be strong enough to deal with it. And the tempest is coming, dear one. Very soon. But not tonight.

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

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.

The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.

You have no idea how strong my love is!

Om Namah Shivaya, meaning, I honor the divinity that resides within me.

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.

Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?

Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment.

Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender.

As a writer, you always read in two minds: You read as a reader and you enjoy it, and you look at it as a writer, and you just admire the architecture and the construction.

Sanity and clarity are more important for me and I'm willing to give up a lot of shimmer for it. I'm willing to have more boring friends, who are sane.

Of course you are. I'm sorry for many of the things I've done, too. Everyone is sorry. It's good to be sorry--but don't make a fetish of it.

I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.

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

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

Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?

You're wishin' too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.

If Todd Willingham was guilty of anything, it was just his self-preservation. He got up and ran out of the house and then thought about the children after the fact.

Oh, I just want what we all want: a comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence and alter my thinking forever.

People keep asking me how I'm doing, and I'm not always sure how to answer that. It depends on the day. It depends on the minute. Right this moment, I'm OK. Yesterday, not so good. Tomorrow, we'll see.

And then, in that regal silence, finally -- I began to meditate on (and with) God.

You have the opposite of poker face. You have like.. miniature golf face.

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

It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage.

The number 108 is held to be the most auspicious, a perfect three-digit multiple of three, its components adding up to 9, which is three threes. And 3, of course, is the number representing supreme balance.

Who amongst us lives without sacrifice?

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

There is a quiet glory in merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations.

There are always two figures in a marriage, two votes, two conflicting sets of decisions, desires and limitations.

I would say that if you really want to STOP knowing someone, you have to divorce him.

David was catnip and kryptonite to me.

Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don't really want to live in it.

How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn't it?

I am the planet's most affectionate life-form, something like the cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle.

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

I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.

Generally speaking, that's good drama -- the marriage plot or the tragedy -- but the reality of women's lives is that most of us don't get what we wanted, and most of us find ways to have really interesting lives anyway.

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later--again, for its own mysterious reasons.

What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God.

We're already separated that's official but there's still a window of hope left open that perhaps someday we could give things another try.

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one.

A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella.

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

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.

I've always been afraid of saying no to people because I don't want them to be disappointed and dislike me.

What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.

So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it.

Embrace the glorious mess that you are.

I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.

Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.

And try not to make a habit of getting engaged in the first place, Vivvie. It can leade to marriage if you're not careful.

Richard didn't even have time to ask if I thought I'd ever amount to anything in this life before I looked him eye to eye and said, "I already have, mister.

When I diagnose my depression now, I think it was partially about saying goodbye to these kids that I always expected to have but already knew that I wouldn't.

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

You have now reached infatuation's final destination--the complete and merciless devaluation of self.

Religious ceremonies are of paramount importance in Bali ( an island, don't forget, with seven unpredictable volcanoes on it-you would pray, too).

Dolce far niente: the pleasure of doing anything.

Man kan måle sit værd på sin loyalitet over for sine valg, ikke på sine succeser eller fiaskoer.

I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what i want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.

Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted.

I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.

I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume.

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.

You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.

I love you, Sister. And I don't use that word lightly! (Neither "love", nor "sister". You embody both).

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

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

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.

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.

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

Dear me, how I love a library.

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.

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

Tis' better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else's perfectly.

For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.

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

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

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.

I think of modern marriage as a car strangely fashioned out of an old abandoned horse carriage, built upon the framework of a mule cart. All the original engineering is still there, underneath it all.

If you're alive, you're a creative person.

The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,...The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.

Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn't always hold.

The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.

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.

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

Oh, cold world -- I have grown so weary of you and all your horrible bathrooms.

Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.

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.

In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted.

If you want to get to the castle, Groceries, you've got to swim the moat.

In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work.

Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people; it's also a political and economic contract of the highest order.

Whenever I would feel such happiness my guilt alarm went off.

Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help loving myself.

Your fear is the most boring thing about you.

Everything really is going to be okay. (And if not okay, then at least comic.).

A glorious failure can sometimes be more life affirming than a cautious win.

Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.'' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?'

I am determined to make the most of this life that I have, damn it -- it's that kind of stubbornness I think we all need more of.

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

Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.

It used to be that god was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.

We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.

Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end.

When it comes to women, get your life together first. Put on your own oxygen mask first. Figure out who you are. Mature. And then go find somebody to share that life with.

As the saying goes, "Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them." Why would I want to keep my limitations?

I saw the apartment almost as a sanatorium, a hospice clinic for my own recovery. I painted the walls in the warmest colors I could find and bought myself flowers every week, as if I were visiting myself in the hospital.

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

If faith were rational , it wouldn't be -by definition- faith.

Let your conscience be your guide.

Nobody until very recently would have thought that their husband was supposed to be their best friend, confidante, intellectual soul mate, co-parent, inspiration.

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?

Everybody imitates before they can innovate.

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.

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

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.

You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it.

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

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.

We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.

I don't think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.

I've come to realize that the contemporary creative culture is not generating the best possible outcome.

And love is always complicated. But still humans most try to love each other, darling. We must get out hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

I see a lot of women who can't travel when they're young, and then their kids grow up and they become amazing adventurers. Travel is not only for the young. Sometimes it's wasted on the young.

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.

That's when Felipe from Brazil asked me in the most natural and relaxed of ways (almost as if he were wondering if we should get a bite to eat), 'Shouldn't we have an affair together, Liz? What do you think?' 283.

I'm a pleaser. That's my character.

I was a writer before 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and I'll be a writer after it's over. It's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

It's what I call the haute couture, high-end version of fear perfectionism. It's just fear in really good shoes. But it's still fear.

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

I actually have a great deal of respect for antidepressants; I think they can be enormously mighty tools toward recovery.

Marriage is a strange combination of dream and reality, and we spend our lives as couples trying to negotiate that divide.

When you want to do something creative and you want to do something new, you have to start with the thing that's making you want to jump up out of bed in the morning.

The fantasy of the wedding day is that it represents undeniable public and private truth that you have been chosen. For that one day, you are the most valuable creature in the world -- a treasure, a princess, a prize.

Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them.

Even in the worst tragedies and crisis, there's no reason to add to everyone's misery by looking miserable yourself.

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

Power is a neutral energy source, like tofu. It's what you do with it that gives it flavor.

From the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: Oh Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong, and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all the acquisitions and accomplishments- they run you down in the end.

I believe in miracles, I believe in the Law of Attraction, but even I don't think I'm big enough to manifest five Asian elephants cloaked in gold.

Look -- I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?

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.

The appreciation of pleasure can be the anchor of humanity.

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.

A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back.

The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement.

I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot.

Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents.

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

Our relationship now thoroughly ruined, with even civility destroyed between us, all I wanted anymore was the door.

I think another way that you can really harm yourself as an artist is by buying into the mythology that it's really important.

The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.

Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history.

Marriage is -- among other things -- a study in contradiction and disappointment, and inside that reality there is space for us to truly learn how to love.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.

If you are given only one opportunity to speak, be certain your voice is heard.

My life acccomplishments? Sanity, and you.

The great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

A man that can cook you a proper meal that is like a weekday meal -- which I think cannot be better than in the form of a roast chicken -- that's the greatest.

It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism.

Absolute certainty is not something I strive for anymore. I've learned the hard way that destiny usually looks upon our most strident convictions with amusement, or perhaps even pity.

Nothing is less efficient than perfectionism.

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

It is completely acceptable to be tired because it means you're working hard. But it's not acceptable to be stressed because that means things are going wrong or your head is broken.

I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives.

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

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

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

Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

The Balinese don't wait and see "how things go." That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart.

Creativity is a gift to the creator not just a gift to the audience.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.

Despite having written five books, I worry that I have not written the right kinds of books, or that perhaps I have dedicated too much of my life to writing, and have therefore neglected other aspects of my being.