Top 500 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

419. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

427. “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

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. “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

430. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

432. “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

433. “What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches!”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

434. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “Virginia Woolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, “all is confusion.” Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will be more perilous.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

442. “Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away... meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.” – Wayan.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert

444. “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

445. “Which is to say, the Romans didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius; they believed that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Elizabeth Gilbert