Hello. I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader and quotes collector. Here is a list of 44 Elizabeth Gilbert quotes that I liked and saved from various books. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes
Life is both dangerous and fleeting, and thus there is no point in denying yourself pleasure or adventure while you are here.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
War is a dreadful business, but it teaches everyone something.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
A writer’s life was easier than an actor’s life. Writers get to set their own hours, they aren’t at the mercy of an audience, and there’s no director telling them what to do.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Well, you can’t have too much conscience about things! Or else you’ll never stop worrying!.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Dance until you collapse, and then keep dancing for a little bit longer after that.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
The thing about fashion, my dears, is that you don’t need to follow it, no matter what they say. No fashion trend is compulsory, remember – and if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person. Paris is all well and good, but we can’t just follow Paris for the sake of Paris, now can we?
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they’re wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is to waste it. So do the right thing with your youth, squander it.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
You can always find girls who can dance like angels, and some boys, too. But to get a man who can dance like a man – that’s not easily found.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Critics cannot make someone a star. Box-office receipts cannot make someone a star. Mere excellence cannot make someone a star. What makes someone a star is when the people decide to love you en masse. When people are willing to line up at the stage door for hours after a show just to catch a glimpse – that makes you a star.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
The truth is often terrifying. Once you introduce truth into a room, the room may never be the same again.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it. Someone makes a promise, and then they break it. A play gets good notices, and then it folds. A marriage looks strong, and then they divorce. For a while there’s no war, and then there’s another war. If you get too upset about it all, you become a stupid, unhappy person – and where’s the good in that?
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Resist change at your own peril. When something ends, let it end.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you.
from Eat, Pray, Love book by Elizabeth Gilbert
People universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
from Eat, Pray, Love book by Elizabeth Gilbert
A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Your life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous, and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you’re still here. I know that’s what you want for yourself, because that’s what I want for myself, too.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. It’s as if all our gods and angels gathered together and said, “It’s tough down there as a human being, we know. Here – have some delights.”.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
We must understand that the drive for perfectionism is a corrosive waste of time, because nothing is ever beyond criticism. No matter how many hours you spend attempting to render something flawless, somebody will always be able to find fault with it. At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is – if only so that you can go on to make other things with a glad and determined heart. Which is the entire point. Or should be.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble. Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby. Everything I have ever written has brought me into being. Every project has matured me in a different way. I am who I am today precisely because of what I have made and what it has made me into.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Oh, dear. Sometimes it takes a very long while to figure things out.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Don’t ask questions that you don’t want to know the answers to.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
In this shallow world a pretty face means everything.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Youth and beauty – they’re such a short lease, girlie. Even if you’re the most beautiful girl in the room right now, there are ten new beauties coming up behind you all the time – younger ones, fresher ones.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
One cannot afford in life to do less than one promises.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
When we are young, we may fall victim to the misconception that time will heal all wounds and that eventually everything will shake itself out. But as we get older, we learn this sad truth: some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right – not by the passage of time, and not by our most fervent wishes, either.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.
from City of Girls book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Keep your eyes open. Listen. Follow your curiosity. Ask questions. Sniff around. Remain open. Trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvelous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day. Ideas of every kind are constantly galloping toward us, constantly passing through us, constantly trying to get our attention.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
The sooner and more passionately you get married to this idea – that it is ultimately entirely up to you – the better off you’ll be.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Your education isn’t over when they say it’s over; your education is over when you say it’s over.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear. I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again, “I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.”.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
There are only so many hours in a day, after all. There are only so many days in a year, only so many years in a life. You do what you can do, as competently as possible within a reasonable time frame, and then you let it go.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
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.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
Do not let your ego totally run the show, or it will shut down the show. 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.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
You have treasures hidden within you – extraordinary treasures – and so do I, and so does everyone around us. And bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and focus and courage and hours of devotion, and the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us – albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
My genius – wherever it comes from – does not keep regular hours. My genius, for what he is worth, does not work on human time and he certainly doesn’t arrange his schedule around my convenience. […] Sometimes I grope around in the dark, desperately looking for magical creative stimulus, and all I come up with is something that feels like a damp washcloth. And then suddenly – whoosh! – inspiration arrives, out of the clear blue sky. And then – whoosh! – it is gone again.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
This is how I want to spend my life – collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
The golden rule in my family is this: If you’re supporting yourself financially and you’re not bothering anyone else, then you’re free to do whatever you want with your life.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
The older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
People will stick you into all sorts of boxes. They’ll call you a genius, or a fraud, or an amateur, or a pretender, or a wannabe, or a has-been, or a hobbyist, or an also-ran, or a rising star, or a master of reinvention. It doesn’t matter in the least. […] Let people have their opinions. More than that – let people be in love with their opinions, just as you and I are in love with ours. But never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else’s blessing in order to make your own creative work. And always remember that people’s judgments about you are none of your business.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
I have dedicated my entire life to the pursuit of creativity, and I spend a lot of time encouraging other people to do the same, because I think a creative life is the most marvelous life there is.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
I had never asked writing to be easy; I had only asked writing to be interesting. And it was always interesting to me. Even when I couldn’t do it right, it was still interesting to me. It still interests me. Nothing has ever interested me more. That profound sense of interest kept me working, even as I had no tangible successes. And slowly I improved. It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert
It has taken me years to learn this, but it does seem to be the case that if I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something.
from Big Magic book by Elizabeth Gilbert