Top 500 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “After all, he says, “beauty attracts beauty.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

402. “Well, child, you may do whatever you like with your suffering,” Hanneke said mildly. “It belongs to you. But I shall tell you what I do with mine. I grasp it by the small hairs, I cast it to the ground, and I grind it under the heel of my boot. I suggest you learn to do the same.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

403. “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

404. “Trust me, if you want to complain, you’ll always find plenty to complain about, even when fortune appears to be shining her favor upon you.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

407. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “I think of modern marriage as a car strangely fashioned out of an old abandoned horse carriage, built upon the framework of a mule cart. All the original engineering is still there, underneath it all.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

413. “I have watched so many other people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay the bills.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

414. “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

415. “Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

416. “I never wanted to be the person that waited for a stranger to come to town – I wanted to be the stranger!”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

417. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

419. “I wanted to be all Gandhi about this. I wanted to be all Nelson Mandela about this. Not realizing at the time that both Gandhi and Mandela were lawyers.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

420. “The sentences still form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought patterns so well now that they don’t bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather endearing – Mr. and Mrs. Yakkity-Yak and their three dumb children, Blah, Blah and Blah. But they don’t agitate my home. There’s room for all of us in this neighborhood.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

421. “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

422. “We are not alien visitors to this planet, after all but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we’ll all end up when we die, and during the interim, it is our home, And there’s no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don’t at least marginally understand our home.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

423. “I happen to believe we are all walking repositories of buried treasure.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

424. “Everybody imitates before they can innovate.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

425. “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

426. “We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing – your sense of division from God.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

427. “You might get nothing out of it at all except a beautiful, long life where all you did was follow your gorgeous curiosity. And that should be enough too.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

428. “If your goal in life is to become fearless, then I believe you’re already on the wrong path, because the only truly fearless people I’ve ever met were straight-up sociopaths and a few exceptionally reckless three-year-olds – and those aren’t good role models for anyone. The truth is, you need your fear, for obvious reasons of basic survival. Evolution did well to install a fear reflex within you, because if you didn’t have any fear, you would lead a short, crazy, stupid life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

429. “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

430. “It’s not enough for me to just hear about something or read about something, I wanna know it in my bones.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

432. “To my sister’s eyes, there is nothing which cannot be explained if one has access to a proper reference library.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

433. “Genetic randomness had already determined how much talent I’d been allotted, and destiny’s randomness would account for my share of luck. The only piece I had any control over was my discipline. Recognizing that, it seemed like the best plan would be to work my ass off. That was the only card I had to play, so I played it hard.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

434. “Having money saved is not quite the same thing as having a plan, mind you – but it does start to make a girl feel as though a plan could someday be possible.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

435. “Nothing is so essential as dignity. Time will reveal who has it and wi has it not.” -Beatrix Whittaker.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

437. “Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

438. “I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

440. “Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

441. “Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them. Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

442. “Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall,’ which blew the top of my head straight off. I’ve read it three times, and I’m still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

443. “What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it’s sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

444. “We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

445. “It ain’t what they call you; it’s what you answer to.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

446. “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

447. “For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

448. “If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be – by definition – faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

449. “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

450. “The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never where you are. You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert