Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

Most of all, though, he asked his students to be brave. Without bravery, he instructed, they would never be able to realize the vaulting scope of their own capacities. Without bravery, they would never know the world as richly as it longs to be known.

C. S. Lewis, when he wrote of his wife, "We both knew this: I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.

people's judgments about you are none of your business.

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?

He became a poet the way other men become monks: as a devotional practice, as an act of love, and as a lifelong commitment to the search for grace and transcendence.

When artists are burdened with the label of "genius," I think they lose the ability to take themselves lightly, or to create freely.

When the time is ripe for certain things, they appear at different places, in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.

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.

It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back.

Thank heavens we have an earth, or where would we sit?

She stopped feeling like she was nothing more than a consumer, nothing more than the sum of her daily obligations and duties.

I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.

It's also important to read the newspaper every day to see how the pope is doing. Here in Rome, the pope's health is recorded daily in the newspaper, very much like weather, or the TV schedule. Today the pope is tired. Yesterday, the pope was less tired than he is today. Tomorrow, we expect that the pope will not be so tired as he was today.

This was not a considered decision. Nor was it a gesture of charity, draped in a warm mantle of maternal kindness. No, this was an act of intuition, sprung from a deep and unspoken feminine knowledge of how the world functions.

alongside me. The fact that I am here at all is evidence that I have the right to be here. I have a right to my own voice and a right to my own vision. I have a right to collaborate with creativity, because I myself am a product and a consequence of Creation. I'm on a mission of artistic liberation, so let the girl go." See? Now you're the one doing the talking.

I want to have a lasting experience of God," I told him. "Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears".

Take me someplace where we can be silent together." ? Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

Your ego is a wonderful servant, but it's a terrible master—because the only thing your ego ever wants is reward, reward, and more reward. And since there's never enough reward to satisfy, your ego will always be disappointed. Left unmanaged, that kind of disappointment will rot you from the inside out. An unchecked ego is what the Buddhists call "a hungry ghost"—forever famished, eternally howling with need and greed.

I told him. I was not accustomed, Angela, to having men listen to me. And as for your father, he was not accustomed to being with a woman who would walk five miles with him in the middle of the night, in the rain, in Queens, just to keep him company when he could not sleep.

which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and it grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything." "I know that is what you think," said Alma, patting his hand again, "and I believe it is quite an inventive notion, Mr. Wallace." "Do you think I'm correct?

All human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who have lived together over long years get to know one another's failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.

It's good to be sorry - but don't make a fetish of it. The one good thing about being Protestant is that we are not expected to cringe forever in contrition. Yours was a venial sin, Vivian, but not a mortal one.' 'I don't know what that means.' 'I'm not sure I do, either. It's just something I once read. Here is what I do know, however: sins of the flesh will not get you punished in the afterlife. They will only get you punished in this life. As you've now learned.

Despair is a tedious business and quickly becomes repetitive.

Why had their lives turned out this way, and not another way?