“Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.”
“I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Mostly you meet friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on the train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell.”
“Everything really is going to be okay. (And if not okay, then at least comic.)”
“Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is American, too-the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“But vegetarians can eat this...Because intestines aren't even meat, Liz. They're just sh$*.”
“In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“What kind of dog is that?" I would always give the same answer: "She's a brown dog." Similarly, when the question is raised, "What kind of God do you believe in?" my answer is easy: "I believe in a magnificent God.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Bhuta ia, dewa ia. (Bali expression meaning Man is a demon, man is a god.)”
“It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainment.”
“The six elements of her Fail Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: "Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope”
“This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me thier badges. I know these guys very well.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches!”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“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.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then - with great forgiveness and fortitude - dismissing them.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“The best we can do then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally - no matter what insanity is transpiring out there.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“He is only happy when he can maintain himself - mentally and spiritually - at the intersection between a vertical line and horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For this, he needs to know where he is located every moment, both in his relationship to the divine and to his family here on earth. If he loses that balance, he loses his power.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love goes away. You are born with nothing, you work hard, then you die with nothing. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old. - Wayan”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“At some point, you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“he was still my romantic hero and I was still his living dream”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“I want to learn how to speak Italian. For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses :)”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“the health of the planet is affected by the health of every individual on it !”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“library is a beautiful old thing”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“traveling is the great true love of my life”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“I'm so excited about school. I'm such a shameless student. I laid my clothes out last night, just like I did before my first day of first grade, with my patent leather shoes and my new lunch box. I hope the teacher will like me :)”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“creative people always suffer from depression because we're so super sensitive and special?”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: "I want a spiritual teacher.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure).”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.”
“Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them.”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you.”
Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims
“the beauty of doing nothing”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
“whenever I would feel such happiness my guilt alarm went off”
Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything
