Top 500 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

102. “Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart. The rest of it will take care of itself.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

105. “I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

106. “Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

107. “In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

108. “I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression – that you should take on this work like a holy calling.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

109. “Todo pasa. Con el tiempo todo pasa.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

110. “That’s just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you’re flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

111. “Because when it all comes together, it’s amazing. When it all comes together, the only thing you can do is bow down in gratitude, as if you have been granted an audience with the divine. Because you have.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

112. “A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

113. “There’s no trouble in this world so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

Featured in: Book Quotes

114. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

Featured in: Book Quotes

115. “Anyway, 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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

116. “The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

118. “You must learn how to become a deeply disciplined half-ass.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

119. “I have a rigid self-accountability. You have to work hard.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

120. “You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

121. “Be the weirdo who dares to enjoy.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

122. “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

123. “Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

124. “Success isn’t about acquiring things, it’s about discovering your life purpose and following the call.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

125. “Own your disappointment, acknowledge it for what it is, and move on.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

126. “Keep showing up for your side of the job and give genius a chance to do its part.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

127. “Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

128. “Never apologize for it, never explain it away, never be ashamed of it. You did your best with what you knew, and you worked with what you had, in the time that you were given. You were invited, and you showed up, and you simply cannot do more than that.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

129. “Most of all, I can choose my thoughts.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

130. “Interesting outcomes, after all, are just awful outcomes with the volume of drama turned way down. I.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

131. “But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

132. “Guilt’s just your ego’s way of tricking you into thinking that you’re making moral progress. Don’t fall for it, my dear.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

133. “I found that eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life’s greatest secret pleasures.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

134. “The world needs women who stop asking for permission from the principal. Permission to live their lives as they deeply know they often should. I think we still look to authority figures for validation, recognition, permission.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

135. “People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything you’re holding back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

136. “Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

138. “Devotion is diligence without assurance. If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be by definition faith. Faith is walking face-first and full speed into the dark.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

140. “Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

141. “If you’re going to answer the call and you’re going to transform and you’re going to change, get ready. It is not a day at the beach.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

142. “It might have been done before, but it hasn’t been done by you!”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

143. “When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

144. “It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

145. “Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

146. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

147. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

148. “I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more that a deep existential angst the says, again and again, ‘I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

149. “Take me someplace where we can be silent together.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

150. “Creativity asks you to enter realms with uncertain outcomes. People want to create a safe life for themselves so they try to live without fear and they end up killing their creativity in the process.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert