Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.

It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism.

I believe that - if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression - that you should take on this work like a holy calling.

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

My work is incredibly important to me personally. It brings me joy and it brings me life and it brings me meaning. It doesn't necessarily have to be important to the people who read it.

You have to work ceaselessly on your end to digest and imbibe your opportunities or, I have come to believe, they will gradually slip away and knock on someone else's more receptive door.

I've come to realize that the contemporary creative culture is not generating the best possible outcome.

My husband is not American. He was born in Brazil, where he grew up under a filthy, corrupt dictatorship. In his twenties, he moved to Europe, where he lived for a while under various socialist democracies. He spent a few years on a kibbutz in Israel, living out a utopian experiment in communal existence.

the beauty of doing nothing

Sometimes beauty needs a bit of ignoring, to properly come into being.

The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.

Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy's distraction.

You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun.

Keep showing up for your side of the job and give genius a chance to do its part.

Step forward out of your own lingering residual sense of smallness, take up every inch of life that is your blessed inheritance, and DO YOUR THING.

Depression on my left, and loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well.

Teach your heart that this is destiny

Absolute certainty is not something I strive for anymore. I've learned the hard way that destiny usually looks upon our most strident convictions with amusement, or perhaps even pity.

Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever.

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

Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying "Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.

A soul mates 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, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life.

we must take care of our families wherever we find them.

We need courage to take ourselves seriously, to look closely and without flinching, to regard the things that frighten us in life and art with wonder.