Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

Oh, dear. Sometimes it takes a very long while to figure things out.

Instead of trying to forcefully take thoughts out of your mind, give your mind something better to play with. Something healthier.

I would so much rather that you wrote a book in order to entertain yourself than to help me. Or if your subject matter is darker and more serious, I would prefer that you made your art in order to save yourself, or to relieve yourself of some great psychic burden, rather than to save or relieve us.

Curiosity is what keeps you working steadily, while hotter emotions may come and go.

Admit what you did... Take your lumps... The sooner you get flattened to the ground, the sooner you can begin to rebuild your life again.

Nature provides the seed; man provides the garden; each is grateful for the other's help.

I'm tired of being a skeptic, I'm irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don't want to hear it anymore. 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.

When the nineteenth-century Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai invented non-Euclidean geometry, his father urged him to publish his findings immediately, before someone else landed on the same idea, saying, "When the time is ripe for certain things, they appear at different places, in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.

Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine.

I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and then I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.

one of the reasons I was so free that year was because I was such a mess.

You might spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end—except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness. And that should be more than enough for anyone to say that they lived a rich and splendid life.

There is a quiet glory [in] merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations.

All the good ideas seem daunting at first.

The hardest part of your life is behind you now.

His face is a comprehensive encyclopaedia of kindness.

Cease partiicipation, if only for one day this year --- if only to make sure that we don't lose forever the rare and vanishing human talent of appreciating ease.

I knew then and I know now only what my heart feels to be true, you see - that without the love of our Lord, I am a wretch. This is the only miracle I can evidence, and a sufficient miracle it remains for me. For others, perhaps it is not sufficient. I can scarcely fault them, for they cannot see into my heart. They cannot see the darkness that was once there, nor can they see what has replaced it.

it's a mighty act of human love to remind somebody that they can accomplish things by themselves

the only truly fearless people I've ever met were straight-up sociopaths and a few exceptionally reckless three-year-olds—and those aren't good role models for anyone. The

Parvati and Shiva are the divine embodiment of creativity (the feminine) and consciousness (the masculine). She is the generative energy of the universe; he is its formless wisdom. Whatever

You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.

count your eggs while they're still up inside the chicken's ass

But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.