Top 500 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “You never know how a good quest is going to end.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

352. “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

353. “Oh, cold world – I have grown so weary of you and all your horrible bathrooms.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

354. “And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

355. “I would say that if you really want to STOP knowing someone, you have to divorce him.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

356. “Sincere spiritual investigation is, and always has been, an endeavor of methodical discipline.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

357. “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

358. “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

359. “Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

360. “At the end of the day I am a writer, and if I don’t take care of this, no one else will.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

361. “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

362. “That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

368. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

370. “It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

374. “Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love – at least as far as I’ve always witnessed.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

386. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

392. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

394. “You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting – its partner – and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing and worthwhile.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

395. “A sage Portuguese sailor who had told him, years before ‘To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

397. “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

398. “But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

399. “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

400. “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