Top 500 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

155. “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

156. “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...”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

157. “You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

158. “All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life – collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand. It’s a strange line of work, admittedly. I cannot think of a better way to pass my days.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

160. “So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

161. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

163. “All the parts of us that we ever were are always going to be with us. You make space to carry them and you just try not to let them drive. But you can’t chuck them out either.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

164. “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

165. “My whole life I’ve been an over-giver. My general operating policy has always been, ‘If it belongs to me, don’t worry: You can have it!’”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

166. “You have no idea how strong my love is!”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

167. “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

168. “Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

169. “When a man who looks like Yoda hands you a prophecy, you have to respond.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

170. “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

171. “I had a great teacher in India who said to me, ‘If you think you’re spiritual and evolved and enlightened, go home for Christmas.’”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

172. “I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

173. “Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

176. “He looks at you like you’re someone he’s never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You’re a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

177. “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

178. “You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

180. “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

181. “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.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

183. “Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

184. “Parla Come Mangi’ – It is a common way to say ‘be simple’, ‘don’t try to be rhetorical’ literaly: ’speak the way you eat.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

189. “Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

190. “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

191. “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

192. “British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s memorable explanation of how the universe works: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

193. “God waited me out.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

196. “We set up one rule in our house, which is, ‘Guests of guests cannot bring guests.’ That rule was required because that happened one weekend, and we finally said, ‘Okay, you know what? That’s a little too much.’”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

197. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

199. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert