Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes
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351. “Learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job o fa creative person... Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

352. “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

353. “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

354. “I cannot overstate the power of libraries in my life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

355. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

361. “The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

362. “If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it’s working on you.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

363. “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

364. “Embrace the creativity and don’t care about the result. It’s better to be a beginner till the end of the life than waiting forever to be perfect.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

365. “People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they’re wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is to waste it. So do the right thing with your youth, Vivian – squander it.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

366. “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

367. “I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

368. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

370. “You are worthy, dear one, regardless of the outcome. You will keep making your work, regardless of the outcome. You will keep sharing your work, regardless of the outcome. You were born to create, regardless of the outcome. You will never lose trust in the creative process, even when you don’t understand the outcome.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “Looking for Truth is not some kind of spazzy free-for-all, not even during this, the great age of the spazzy free-for-all.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

377. “A man that can cook you a proper meal that is like a weekday meal – which I think cannot be better than in the form of a roast chicken – that’s the greatest.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

379. “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

380. “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

381. “My hypersensitive awareness of time’s speed led me to push myself to experience life at a maximum pace. If I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I had to do everything possible to experience it now.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

382. “There are always two figures in a marriage, two votes, two conflicting sets of decisions, desires and limitations.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

383. “There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I’m alone and trying to solve a sentence. It’s exciting, even when it’s frustrating, even when I can’t do it right.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

384. “Love is like that is a deep well with steep sides. Once you fall in, that’s it. You will love that person always.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

385. “I’m still aspiring to be a better and better person, but I think that disappointments have made me gentler with other people and their disappointments, the stuff that they have to carry around and endure.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

386. “How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

388. “Reality has taught us that no woman can build an honest life without sacrificing something along the way. Deciding what will be sacrificed is not easy.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

389. “Here in America, marriage still has a mystical, intangible power: It is a passport to adulthood and respectability and to a certain extent citizenship. Any relationship less than “married” is considered temporary and not worthy of honor.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

394. “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

395. “It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

396. “When you want to do something creative and you want to do something new, you have to start with the thing that’s making you want to jump up out of bed in the morning.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

397. “My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive-a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too-but who amongst us lives without sacrifice?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

398. “I don’t want to be afraid of bright colors, or new sounds, or big love, or risky decisions, or strange experiences, or weird endeavors, or sudden changes, or even failure.”

— 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. “What do I believe that I deserve in this life?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert