Top 500 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “And you have treasures hidden within you – extraordinary treasures – and so do I, and so does everyone around us. And bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and focus and courage and hours of devotion, and the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

152. “Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

153. “Whenever I got those rejection letters, then, I would permit my ego to say aloud to whoever had signed it: “You think you can scare me off? I’ve got another eighty years to wear you down! There are people who haven’t even been born yet who are gonna reject me someday – that’s how long I plan to stick around.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

154. “Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise – you can make anything. So please calm down now and get back to work, okay? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

155. “If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

156. “If you don’t learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you’ll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

157. “Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into the realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

158. “The best we can do then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally – no matter what insanity is transpiring out there.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

159. “Only through constant focus can you become independent. Only through independence can you know yourself. And only through knowing yourself will you be able to ask the key question of your life: What is is that I am destined to accomplish, and how can I make it happen?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

160. “Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

161. “If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

162. “We can do it, whether it can be done or not.” Eventually, all of us will be called upon to do the thing that cannot be done.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

163. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

164. “We don’t have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

165. “Nature provides the seed; man provides the garden; each is grateful for the other’s help.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

166. “If you show up for your work day after day after day, you just might get lucky enough some random morning to burst right into bloom.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

167. “If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be -by definition- faith.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

168. “Your art not only doesn’t have to be original, in other words; it also doesn’t have to be important.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

169. “I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’ – the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

170. “Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch – there’s not a chance.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

172. “Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

173. “I had creativity within me that was original; I had a personality within me that was original; I had dreams and perspectives and aspirations within me that were original.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

174. “Everybody imitates before they can innovate.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

175. “Do whatever brings you to life, then.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

176. “You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for your work.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

177. “Go be whomever you want to be, then. Do whatever you want to do. Pursue whatever fascinates you and brings you to life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

178. “There’s nothing special about your fear.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

179. “Artists, by nature, are gamblers. Gambling is a dangerous habit. But whenever you make art, you’re always gambling. You’re rolling the dice on the slim odds that your investment of time, energy, and resources now might pay off later in a big way – that somebody might buy your work, and that you might become successful.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

180. “This is why we have to be careful of how we handle our fear – because I’ve noticed that when people try to kill off their fear, they often end up inadvertently murdering their creativity in the process.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

181. “I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

182. “Most of my writing life consist of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that’s how it gets done.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

183. “Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

184. “If you want to get to the castle, Groceries, you’ve got to swim the moat.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

185. “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?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

186. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

187. “Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No? It’s because he doesn’t care! He’s in a room with a naked girl, he just won the lottery.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

189. “The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: “So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.” Perfectionism.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

190. “Not everything has an answer.” Alma found this to be such a staggering piece of intelligence that she was struck dumb by it for several hours. All she could do was sit and ponder the notion in an amazed stupor.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

191. “But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time – everything.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

192. “Marriage is not a game for the young.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

193. “I do not need to love you to prove that I love myself!!”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

194. “I happen to believe we are all walking repositories of buried treasure. I believe this is one of the oldest and most generous tricks the universe plays on us human beings, both for its own amusement and for ours: The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels – that’s creative living.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

195. “No experience in this world has ever been cathartic without the willing participation of the individual. Life does not automatically bestow wisdom or growth upon anyone just for showing up.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

196. “She said: “We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we’re so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth – nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

197. “The poet David Whyte calls this sense of creative entitlement “the arrogance of belonging,” and claims that it is an absolutely vital privilege to cultivate if you wish to interact more vividly with life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

198. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

199. “Gratitude, always. Always, gratitude.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

200. “Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert