Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

“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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“You have no idea how strong my love is!”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I look at the Augusteum,and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me to not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it. Somone makes a promise, and then they break it. A play gets good notices, and then it folds. A marriage looks strong, and then they divorce. For a while there's no war, and then there's another war. If you get too upset about it all, you become a stupid, unhappy person—and where's the good in that?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don't stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change…”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“No matter what the industry you choose to ultimately invest all your time and energy in, be sure you're the owner, founder, and CEO. Remember, if you don't own it, you can't control it nor can you depend on it.”
― Brandi L. Bates, Moonshine For The Soul: A Path to Strength, Wisdom, Growth, Health & Happiness

“The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“Wonder isn't about finding answers; it's about becoming more comfortable with questions.”
― Leigh Ann Henion, Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World

“Creativity is a crushing chore and a glorious mystery. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Go back to bed so that, when the tempest comes, you'll be strong enough to deal with it. And the tempest is coming, dear one. Very soon. But not tonight.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I am so consumed by wonder at their bravery. These people have left their families and lives behind for a few weeks to go into silent retreat amidst a crowd of perfect strangers in India. Not everybody does this in their lifetime.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“I filled the song with everything I wished I could teach him about life. I tried to reassure him with every line about how the world is hard and unfair sometimes, but that it's all OK beacuse he is so loved. He is surrounded by souls who would do anything to help him. And not only that- he has wisdom and patience of his own, buried deep inside his being, which will only reveal themselves over time and will always carry him through any trial. He is a gift from God to all of us.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“And try not to make a habit of getting engaged in the first place, Vivvie. It can leade to marriage if you're not careful.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don’t need to follow it, no matter what they say. No fashion trend is compulsory, remember—and if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person. Paris is all well and good, but we can’t just follow Paris for the sake of Paris, now can we?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“The child is taught form earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collet your soul and bring you to heaven.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Dessutom kunde jag inte glömma vad min syster en gång hade sagt till mig medan hon ammade: ''Att skaffa barn är som att skaffa sig en tatuering i ansiktet. Man måste vara bergsäker på att det är så man vill ha det innan man sätter igång.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“We stared at each other for a while. There was a good deal of information conveyed across the silence, a whole conversation, you might say. This is waht flirtation is in its purest form, a conversation held without words. Flirtation is a series of silent questions that one person asks another person with their eyes. And the answer to those questions is always the same word: Maybe.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“We stared at each other for a while. There was a good deal of information conveyed across the silence, a whole conversation, you might say. This is what flirtation is in its purest form, a conversation held without words. Flirtation is a series of silent questions that one person asks another person with their eyes. And the answer to those questions is always the same word: Maybe.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls