Elizabeth Gilbert Life Quotations

My whole life I've been an over-giver. My general operating policy has always been, 'If it belongs to me, don't worry: You can have it!'

I want to have a lasting experience with God. Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I loose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. 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 leave in this world and enjoy its delights, but also elevate myself to God.

Richard didn't even have time to ask if I thought I'd ever amount to anything in this life before I looked him eye to eye and said, "I already have, mister.

I wondered, "Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?

What do I believe that I deserve in this life?

Traveling is the great true love of my life... I am loyal and constant in my love of travel. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby - I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me.

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

But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilling yearnings.

What we're all sort of trying to do in our lives is to make the simplest things work out the best.

A glorious failure can sometimes be more life affirming than a cautious win.

The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Nobody's life is interesting enough to warrant a third memoir.

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, then introduce you to your spiritual master...

At some point, you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.

What happens and what you encounter, what you collide with - it's so exciting and revealing about how much more interesting and tricky the universe is than we think in our daily lives.

Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.

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.

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

That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

Tis' better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else's perfectly.

the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry.

To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.

I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.

traveling is the great true love of my life

Part of the elasticity that you need, in order to continue to try to create, is the foregone conclusion that not all of it is going to be fabulously successful. But it's all going to be part of a long lifetime body of experimentation.

You know, why at the end of your life should you assemble thousands of pages of 'Why am I so sad, why am I so depressed?' Instead, assemble thousands of pages of why you're so content.