Top 500 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “Nothing is so essential as dignity. Time will reveal who has it and wi has it not.” -Beatrix Whittaker.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

452. “What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches!”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

453. “Which is to say, the Romans didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius; they believed that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

454. “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

455. “Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story. All those predicaments that we humans find ourselves in – predicaments that we never see coming, do not know how to handle, and then cannot fix.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

456. “What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then – with great forgiveness and fortitude – dismissing them.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

457. “In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

458. “But when it comes to writing the thing that I’ve sort of been thinking about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

459. “Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away... meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.” – Wayan.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

460. “One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

461. “She remembered a line from Montaigne, something she had read years ago, which had always stayed with her, and which now felt horribly pertinent: “These are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

462. “But we are not what the other one needs, still he is certain that I will find great love in my life someday. He is sure of it. After all, he says, beauty attracts beauty.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

463. “The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust – and those elements are universally accessible. Which does not mean that creative living is always easy; it merely means that creative living is always possible.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

464. “My life acccomplishments? Sanity, and you.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

465. “Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

466. “Rest assured, dear friend, that many noteworthy and great sciences and arts have been discovered through the understanding and subtlety of women, both in cognitive speculation, demonstrated in writing, and in the arts, manifested in manual works of labor. I will give you plenty of examples. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies 1405.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

467. “Those girls are on the road to trouble,” I heard an older woman say about us one night, as we were staggering down the street drunk – and that woman was absolutely right. What she didn’t understand, though, is that trouble is what we wanted.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

468. “Everything good I’ve ever gotten in life, I only got because I gave something else up.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

470. “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

471. “Please tell me I’m not the only one who finds it endearing and encouraging that a legendary Roman philosopher had to reassure himself that it’s okay not to be Plato.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

472. “To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

474. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

475. “Instead of trying to forcefully take thoughts out of your mind, give your mind something better to play with. Something healthier.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

476. “And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

477. “If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be – by definition – faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

478. “My desire to work – my desire to engage with my creativity as intimately and as freely as possible – is my strongest personal incentive to fight back against pain, by any means necessary, and to fashion a life for myself that is as sane and healthy and stable as it can possibly be. But.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

479. “I think that the difference between a tormented creative life and a tranquil creative life is nothing more than the difference between the word awful and the word interesting.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

481. “As the psychologist Carol Gilligan has written, “Women’s sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women is to see themselves in a relationship of connection.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

482. “Virginia Woolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, “all is confusion.” Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will be more perilous.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

483. “I like it when science and devotion find places of intersection.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

484. “There is a famous question that shows up, it seems, in every single self-help book ever written: What would you do if you knew that you could not fail? But I’ve always seen it differently. I think the fiercest question of all is this one: What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail? What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant? What do you love even more than you love your own ego? How fierce is your trust in that love?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

485. “You have to work ceaselessly on your end to digest and imbibe your opportunities or, I have come to believe, they will gradually slip away and knock on someone else’s more receptive door.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

486. “I think a lot of people who feel as though they desperately want to be married oftentimes simply desperately want to have a wedding.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

487. “Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

488. “Sometimes beauty needs a bit of ignoring, to properly come into being.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

489. “Because either way, it’s all kind of amazing – what we get to do, what we get to attempt, what we sometimes get to commune with.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

490. “We can change our wives,” he said. “We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

491. “I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. What is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

492. “There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

493. “This proclamation of intent and entitlement is not something you can do just once and then expect miracles; it’s something you must do daily, forever.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

494. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

495. “She did not need a library; she was a library.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

496. “Students told me he was the most extraordinary man they’d ever encountered. He had seemed not quite of this world, they said. He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged them to do the same. He didn’t so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why: because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

497. “Lastly, she knew one other thing, and this was the most important realization of all: she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact. This.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

498. “I have these new policies toward my life, like ‘I will not accelerate when I see the yellow light.’”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

499. “Where did you get the idea you aren’t allowed to petition the universe with prayer? You are part of this universe, Liz. You’re a constituent – you have every entitlement to participate in the actions of the universe, and to let your feelings be known. So, put your opinion out there. Make your case. Believe me – it will at least be taken into consideration.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

500. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert