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Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes: 63

  • This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • 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.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • There were times, especially when I was traveling for 'Eat, Pray, Love,' when, I swear to God, I would feel this weight of my female ancestors, all those Swedish farmwives from beyond the grave who were like, 'Go! Go to Naples! Eat more pizza! Go to India, ride an elephant! Do it! Swim in the Indian Ocean. Read those books. Learn a language.

  • To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

    Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

  • To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balancedlife.

    Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

  • Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

    Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

  • 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.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • 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...

  • 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.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.

  • It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • 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.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • 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?

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

  • You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.

  • I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • 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.

    Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

  • Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • 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 our 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.

  • Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.

    Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

  • Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

    Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

  • You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.

  • People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result 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.

  • I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, 'I agree with you.' Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • 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.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • [Saint Anthony] said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark.

  • One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • God dwells within you, as you.

  • If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian...I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.

  • Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it's more like love's shady second cousin who's always borrowing money and can't hold down a job.

    Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

  • We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • The day is ending. It's time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, Let go.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together -- in misery, but happy to not be apart.

  • With each reunion (we) had to learn each other all over again. There was always that nervous moment at the airport when I would stand there waiting for him to arrive, wondering, Will I still know him? Will he still know me?

    Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

  • 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.

    Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

  • Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?

  • Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • There’s a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, "Let me take care of you forever,"and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I’d given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely...

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • All I could say was, "I don't know what to do."I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, "Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • عندما يمنحك الله الحياة ، من واجبك (ومن حقك ككائن بشري) أن تجد شيئًا جميلًا فيها ، مهما كان ضئيلًا

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

    Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

  • True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.

    Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

  • But I was always coming here. I though about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what i want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.

  • I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work …

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • من شأن السجود أن يصبح باردًا ويغرق في الملل المألوف إن تركت انتباهك يشت عنه .ولكن إن حافظت على تركيزك ، فإنك تتحمل بذلك مسؤولية الحفاظ على روحك

    Eat, Pray, Love

  • نصف فائدة السجود تتمثل في الطلب بحدّ ذاته ، في النية السليمة الواضحة .

    Eat, Pray, Love