Top 500 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there’s a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

352. “I have more compassion than if I had led a life where everything worked out exactly as I had planned or if I had never been wounded or if I had never been betrayed or I had never been harmed. I don’t think I would be as good a person.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

353. “It has taken me years to learn this, but it does seem to be the case if that I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

354. “I thought my aunt was terrific. She had paid attention to me as a person, not a child, and that means everything to an eleven-year-old child who does not want to be seen as a child.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

355. “If you clear out all of that space in your mind you would have a door way.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

356. “I used to say, ‘Man, I think I’d be a really good dad. I’ll be a great provider. I’m funny; I’ll go on trips with them – I’ll do all sorts of stuff.’ But the momming? I’m not made for that. I have a really good mom; I know what she put into it.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

357. “You are free, because everyone is too busy fussing over themselves to worry all that much about you. Go be whomever you want to be, then. Do whatever you want to do. Pursue whatever fascinates you and brings you to life. Create whatever you want to create – and let it be stupendously imperfect, because it’s exceedingly likely that nobody will even notice. And that’s awesome.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

358. “The act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

359. “I’m afraid many women do choose the wedding over the marriage. It seems a steep price to pay, but it comes from a place of deep, sad longing to be loved and to have it proven that you are of value.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

360. “I work either way, you see – assisted or unassisted – because that is what you must do in order to live a fully creative life. I work steadily, and I always thank the process. Whether I am touched by grace or not, I thank creativity for allowing me to engage with it at all.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

361. “As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift-or curse, perhaps-of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we’re just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

362. “There are so many good reasons to stop complaining if you want to live a more creative life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

363. “We’re already separated that’s official but there’s still a window of hope left open that perhaps someday we could give things another try.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

364. “I don’t think you can say that feminism has made women critical of marriage because women have been critical of marriage for centuries.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

365. “But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with think, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn’t. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

366. “Famously, Gloria Steinem once advised women that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What I’ve only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

367. “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

368. “Mostly you meet friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on the train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

369. “When the time is ripe for certain things, they appear at different places, in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

370. “Your treasure – your perfection – is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. The kundalini shakti – the supreme energy of the divine – will take you there.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

371. “Creativity is a path for the brave, yes, but it is not a path for the fearless, and it’s important to recognize the distinction.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

372. “You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

373. “Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say – no detail spared in the quest for perfection.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

374. “But I remember thinking that learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job of a creative person. If you want to be an artist of any sort, it seemed to me, then handling your frustration is a fundamental aspect of the work – perhaps the single most fundamental aspect of the work.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

375. “Maturity brings – among other things – the ability to sustain and survive enormous contradictions and disappointments.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

376. “We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That’s our privilege. That’s the joy of a mortal body. And that’s why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

377. “Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody – really want him – it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

378. “Basically, your fear is like a mall cop who thinks he’s a Navy SEAL: He hasn’t slept in days, he’s all hopped up on Red Bull, and he’s liable to shoot at his own shadow in an absurd effort to keep everyone “safe.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

379. “The culture of Rome just doesn’t match the culture of Yoga, not as far as I can see. In fact, I’ve decided that Rome and Yoga don’t have anything in common at all. Except for the way they both kind of remind you of the word toga.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

380. “Through the mere act of creating something – anything – you might inadvertently produce work that is magnificent, eternal, or important.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

381. “Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

382. “The fantasy of the wedding day is that it represents undeniable public and private truth that you have been chosen. For that one day, you are the most valuable creature in the world – a treasure, a princess, a prize.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

383. “This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

384. “Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. At least then you will know that you have tried and that – whatever the outcome – you have traveled a noble path.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

385. “I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be ‘the happiest moment’ of one’s life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

386. “After all, he says, “beauty attracts beauty.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

387. “I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

388. “I don’t think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

389. “Not everyone is meant to charge through the world, carrying a spear.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

390. “The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

391. “Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

392. “He realized that “failure has a function. It asks you whether you really want to go on making things.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

393. “Speak to your darkest and most negative interior voices the way a hostage negotiator speaks to a violent psychopath: calmly, but firmly. Most of all, never back down. You cannot afford to back down. The life you are negotiating to save, after all, is your own.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

394. “In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a codega – a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

395. “Flexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline. Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

396. “What does any of that have to do with the quiet glory of merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

397. “We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses – one foot is on the horse called “fate,” the other on the horse called “free will.” And the question you have to ask every day is – which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it’s not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

398. “The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

399. “Perhaps creativity’s greatest mercy is this: By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are. Best of all, at the end of your creative adventure, you have a souvenir – something that you made, something to remind you forever of your brief but transformative encounter with inspiration.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

400. “I’ve heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert