Quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert

Tiramisu for desert.

It doesn't have to be perfect, and you don't have to be Plato.

The classical Indian sages wrote that there are three factors which indicate whether a soul has been blessed with the highest and most auspicious luck in the universe: To have been born a human being, capable of conscious inquiry. To have been born with—or to have developed—a yearning to understand the nature of the universe. To have found a living spiritual master.

Don't fall into a funk about the one that got away. Don't beat yourself up. Don't rage at the gods above. All that is nothing but distraction, and the last thing you need is further distraction. Grieve if you must, but grieve efficiently. Better to just say good-bye to the lost idea with dignity and continue onward. Find something else to work on—anything, immediately—and get at it. Keep busy.

Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught.

I'm too old to hide who I am, Frank. And I'm too old to be made to feel ashamed of myself by anyone—

the signature of all things"—namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator's love.

Love like that is a deep well, with steep sides. Once you fall in, that's it - you will love that person always.

His penmanship was shamefully crabbed. Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page. His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness.

Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. At least then you will know that you have tried and that--whatever the outcome--you have traveled a noble path.

The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.)

Sex is so often a cheat—a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody's heart by knowing, instead, their mere body.

people do draw hateful conclusions like this all the time. People convince themselves that they have been robbed when they have not, in fact, been robbed. Such thinking comes from a wretched allegiance to the notion of scarcity—from the belief that the world is a place of dearth, and that there will never be enough of anything to go around.

Later in life, when Alma was a woman of science, she would better understand how the introduction of any new element into a controlled environment will alter that environment in manifold and unpredictable ways, but as a child, all she sensed was a hostile invasion and a premonition of doom. Alma did not embrace her interloper with a warm heart. Then again, why should she have? Who among us has ever warmheartedly embraced an interloper?

Following that scavenger hunt of curiosity can lead you to amazing, unexpected places.

Ibelieve that inspiration will always try its best to work with you—but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.

My ultimate choice, then, is to always approach my work from a place of stubborn gladness.

finally realized that my fear was boring. Mind you, my fear had always been boring to everybody else, but it wasn't until mid-adolescence that it became, at last, boring even to me. My fear became boring to me, I believe, for the same reason that fame became boring to Jack Gilbert: because it was the same thing every day.

En la Edad Media, cuando los cruzados llegaron a Oriente durante las guerras santas, vieron a los devotos rezar con sus japa malas y, admirados, llevaron la idea a Europa, donde se convirtió en el rosario.

Other people come here worshipping Eustace. They want to please him, so they let him take over their entire selves, and that's when the resentment starts to build. It builds slowly, over time. What wears people down here isn't the physical labor but the psychological stress of losing their identity.

Begin anywhere. Preferably right now. And if greatness should ever accidentally stumble upon you, let it catch you hard at work. Hard at work, and sane.

He tells me that there are many ways to find God but most are too complicated for Westerners, so he will teach me an easy meditation. Which goes, essentially, like this: sit in silence and smile. I love it. He's laughing even as he's teaching it to me. Sit and smile. Perfect.

you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you're gonna wear every day. This

Either way, the vulnerable human ego is protected. Protected from the corrupting influence of praise. Protected from the corrosive effects of shame.