Top 500 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

452. “What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it’s sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

453. “But maybe that’s where love grows best – in the deep space that exists between polarities.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

455. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

456. “It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

457. “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

458. “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

459. “I consider a good dinner party at our house to be where people drink and eat more than they’re meant to.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

460. “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

461. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

462. “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

463. “If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be – by definition – faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

464. “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

465. “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

466. “Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall,’ which blew the top of my head straight off. I’ve read it three times, and I’m still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

470. “What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

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. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

483. “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

484. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

486. “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

487. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

489. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

492. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome. Your fear – programmed by evolution to be hypervigilant and insanely overprotective – will always assume that any uncertain outcome is destined to end in a bloody, horrible death. Basically, your fear is like a mall cop who thinks he’s a Navy SEAL:.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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