Looking for the best and inspirational Elizabeth Gilbert quotes?
Elizabeth Gilbert is an American author, journalist, chef, and television personality. She is best known for her 2006 memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” adapted into a film of the same name in 2010.
She has made a career of writing about her life experiences by using creative storytelling and imagination. In addition to being a novelist, she is also a journalist. She has written for many major publications, including “The New Yorker” and “Vogue.” Her articles are often featured in magazines such as The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine.
Her breakthrough book was the catalyst for a four-year journey that took her to Italy and India. In her work, she has explored themes such as authenticity and spirituality. Her 1995 novel “The Last American Man” was about the life of Everett Ruess – a poet who vanished without a trace in the Colorado desert.
In 2006 Elizabeth published her memoir “Eat, Pray, Love.” This book became an international success garnering media coverage from all over the world. It continues to be one of the most successful books that Elizabeth has ever written.
She is also known for her role as an actress in films such as “Big Fish,” “The House Bunny” and “I Am Number Four
Here are her most inspirational quotes about prayer, eating, and love that have the power to change your outlook and make you a better person in the process..”
Top 75 Most Inspiring Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes
“Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.”
“Your own reasons to create are reason enough. Merely by pursuing what you love, you may inadvertently end up helping us plenty.”
“My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically) and it also must not matter at all ( if I am to live sanely).”
“When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.”
“Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?”
“Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for, how will it ever occur?”
“You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”
“I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.”
“I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.”
“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”
“Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.”
“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”
“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
“Fear is boring, because fear only ever has one thing to say to us, and that thing is: ‘STOP!.”
“There’s no dishonor in having a job. What is dishonorable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence.”
“Ideas of every kind are constantly galloping toward us, constantly pass through us, constantly trying to get our attention.”
“I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, ‘There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge?”
“And since creativity is still the most effective way for me to access wonder, I choose it.”
“…it’s all kind of amazing—what we get to do, what we get to attempt, what we sometimes get to commune with.”
“Italian men are like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud.”
“In the end, creativity is a gift to the creator, not just the audience.”
“It’s so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it’s been polluted.”
“But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilling yearnings.”
“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.”
“Be the weirdo who dares to enjoy.”
“I disappear into the person I love. If I love you, you can have it all.”
“Most of their lives, most people just walk around saying: No, No, No, No, No. Then again, someday you just might say yes.”
“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”
“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”
“Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed.”
“Let inspiration lead you wherever it wants. For most of history people just made things, and they didn’t make such a big freaking deal out of it.”
“Seduce the Big Magic and it will always come back to you.”
“That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”
“Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe.”
“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.”
“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.”
“I am a better person when I have less on my plate.”
“It’s better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else’s perfectly.”
“Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.”
“It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too.”
“If you don’t have the courage, let’s try to get you some. Because creative living is a path for the brave. We all know this. And we all know that when courage dies, creativity dies with it.”
“You won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies when you finally realize this liberating truth: nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.”
“God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.”
“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.”
“Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.”
“Perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat.”
“You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
“Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.”
“The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.”
“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
“Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship – a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.”
“What is creativity? Creativity is a crushing chore and a glorious mystery. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.”
“The Bhagavad Gita–that ancient Indian Yogic text–says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.”
“You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.”
“When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.”
“All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life—collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand. It’s a strange line of work, admittedly. I cannot think of a better way to pass my days.”
“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
“Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can’t let this one go. It’s over.”
“I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.”
“But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilling yearnings.”
“The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.”
“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.”
“We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.”
“Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.’”
“A soulmate’s purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in.”
“If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.”
“You do not need anybody’s permission to live a creative life.”
“There’s no trouble in this world so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.”
“Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.”
“There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.”
“We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure–your perfection–is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.”
“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.”
“Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.”
“This is a world, not a womb. You can look after yourself in this world while looking after your creativity at the same time — just as people have done for ages.”
“Through the mere act of creating something—anything—you might inadvertently produce work that is magnificent, eternal, or important.”
“Your own reasons to make art are reason enough. Create whatever causes a revolution in your own heart.”
“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow — this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”
