As someone who went through divorce and the turbulent times before, during, and after that time of my life, I can attest that the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert helped me greatly. Even though I didn’t go on my own international journey of self-discovery, Liz’s words were somehow still incredibly relatable. And her divorce recovery learnings helped shaped my own healing journey beautifully. Keep reading for what I think are the 100+ Best Eat, Pray, Love Quotes by Liz and other key figures from this beloved book.
On Finding My Favorite Quotes
I actually read this book before I even knew I was getting a divorce. And I don’t even remember how it got on my radar besides the fact that it was wildly famous. But somehow the Universe knew that I needed Liz’s words to get through what was one of the most difficult experiences of my entire life.
Divorce is not for the weak of heart.
Nor is the optional healing journey for those brave enough to stare into the depths of their own life “destruction”. And I do think it’s optional since some people (not that I blame them) prefer to just dust things over and leave the deep and often dark parts untouched.
Liz felt like my divorce guru (a word she uses a lot in the book – though not one she ever called herself – I’m just tying the themes together especially since her words became a light in the dark for me helping me find my way).
Her words helped me have the strength to face my darkness, push through discomfort to embrace meditation (which was HUGE in my healing), and connect with God / the Universe.
I’ve read this book (both on paper and via audiobook) at least 4 or 5 times now. I’ve lost count. But I haven’t lost track of my favorite Eat, Pray, Love quotes. Page corners folded down and highlighting galore. And every time I open the book, I find new words to love. New meanings that I missed in the past. Or maybe and more ready to receive.
And so I re-opened my book to help collect these 100+ Eat, Pray, Love quotes. I searched the tagged pages and highlights. I held the worn pages and worn down cover. I revisited some of my favorite words – the ones that made me stop in my tracks as well as the ones that felt like a loving hug.
And I’ve collected them for you here…
100+ Best Eat, Pray, Love Quotes (From Elizabeth Gilbert’s Beloved Book)
Here are (imo) the 100+ best Eat, Pray, Love quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert and the inspirational people she meets on her journey of self discovery after divorce. Traveling to Italy, then India, and finally Bali, Liz makes her way through one of life’s most difficult life experiences to find herself and her strength again. Sometimes messy yet somehow also beautiful, her words have touched many. And have been a light in the dark for even me. May they help guide you too!
Note: All quotes are by Elizabeth Gilbert unless otherwise noted. I tried to check as many quotes as I could, but if you see any errors, please let me know! In some cases on the graphics I referenced the book instead of a name because either it was not necessarily a direct quote by Liz or simply made more sense to me that way.
Eat, Pray, Love Quotes on Happiness
“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.” p. 260
“At some point, as Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.” p. 155
“We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure–your perfection–is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.”
“I wondered, “Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?”
“Here’s how you can tell if you’ve reached the turiya state – if you’re in a state of constant bliss. One who is living from within turiya is not affected by the swinging moods of the mind, nor fearful of time or harmed by loss.” p. 196 Note: turiya is “the elusive fourth level of human consciousness.”
“And when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt – this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight.”
“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.”
“Still, when I look at myself in the mirror of the best pizzeria in Naples, I see a bright-eyed, clear-skinned, happy and healthy face. I haven’t seen a face like that on me for a long time. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper.” p. 81
Quotes on Purpose and Destiny
“Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship – a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.”
“There’s a reason we refer to “leaps of faith” – because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don’t care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn’t. If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be – by definition – faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be… a prudent insurance policy.”
“The Bhagavad Gita–that ancient Indian Yogic text–says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.” p. 95
“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. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?”
“According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life.” p. 197
“Virginia Woolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, “all is confusion.” Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will be more perilous.”
“I found a seat under an orange tree and opened one of the poetry books I’d purchased yesterday. Louise Glück. I read the first poem in Italian, then in English, and stopped short at this line:
Dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontana…
‘From the center of my life, there came a great fountain…’
I set the book down in my lap, shaking with relief.”
p. 39
Eat, Pray, Love Travel Quotes
“Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies.”
“Longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness.”
“Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. 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. It can barf all over me if it wants to–I just don’t care.”
Freedom, Lightness, and Peace Quotes
“So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”
“The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement.”
“I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine.”
“I am a better person when I have less on my plate.”
“But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one’s life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favourite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?”
“This is a sweet expression. Il bel far niente means “the beauty of doing nothing.” p. 61
“The other day a monk told me, ‘The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That’s where you need to go.’” p. 141
“So what can we do about the craziness of the world?”
“Nothing.” Ketut laughed, but with a dose of kindness. “This is nature of world. This is destiny. Worry about your craziness only – make you in peace.”
“But how should we find peace within ourselves?” I asked Ketut.
“Meditation,” he said. “Purpose of meditation is only happiness and peace – very easy.”
INSTRUCTIONS FOR FREEDOM
1. Life’s metaphors are God’s instructions.
2. You have just climbed up and above the roof, there is nothing between you and the Infinite. Now, let go.
3. The day is ending. It’s time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, let go.
4. Your wish for resolution was a prayer. Your being here is God’s response. Let go, and watch the stars came out – on the outside and on the inside.
5. With all your heart, ask for grace, and let go.
6. With all your heart, forgive him, FORGIVE YOURSELF, and let him go.
7. Let your intention be freedom from useless suffering. Then, let go.
8. Watch the heat of day pass into the cool night. Let go.
9. When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.
10. When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.
~ The plumber / poet from New Zealand p. 184
Eat, Pray, Love Quotes on Balance
“The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,…The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being’s difficulty in coming to virtuous balance with himself.”
“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.” p. 206
“To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. 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.” ~ Ketut Liyer p. 27
Eat, Pray, Love Quotes on Meditation and Thoughts
“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.”
“The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure… I’m lonely… I’m a failure… I’m lonely…) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.”
“But if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.” P. 173
“Meditate on whatever causes a revolution in your mind.” ~A monk in the ashram in India p. 142
“Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.” p.171
“Remember what the Guru teaches us – if you sit down with the pure intention to meditate, whatever happens next is none of your business. So why are you judging your experiences?” ~Richard from Texas p. 140
“You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
“I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’ — the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.”
“The truth is, I don’t think I’m good at meditation. I know I’m out of practice with it, but honestly I was never good at it. I can’t seem to get my mind to hold still. I mentioned this once to an Indian monk, and he said, “It’s a pity you’re the only person in the history of the world who ever had this problem.” Then the monk quoted to me from the Bhagavad Gita, the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: “Oh Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind.”
“‘Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver.” ~Ketut Liyer p. 231
Quotes on Mentors and Support
“In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.” p. 334 (Note: these are the last lines of the book – found within the “Final Recognition and Reassurance” section)
“A great Yogi is anyone who has achieved the permanent state of enlightened bliss. A Guru is a great Yogi who can actually pass that state on to others. The word Guru is composed of two Sanskrit syllables. The first means ‘darkness,’ the second means ‘light.’ Out of the darkness and into the light. What passes from the master into the disciple is something called mantravirya: ‘The potency of the enlightened consciousness.’ You come to your Guru, then, not only to receive lessons, as from any teacher, but to actually receive the Guru’s state of grace.”
“There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one.” p. 124
Straight Talk Style Quotes
I called this section “straight talk” because I find these quotes have a shared energy of being direct and sometimes even hard hitting. In the best way possible.
“Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.”
“You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.” ~Richard from Texas p.150
“I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, ‘There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge?”
“Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed.”
“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.”
“You gotta learn how to let go, Groceries. Otherwise you’re gonna make yourself sick.” ~Richard from Texas p. 151
“Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time – when pursued like a bandit – will behave like one.” p. 155
“Good. This smile will make you beautiful woman. This will give you power of to be very pretty. You can use this power – pretty power! – to get what you want in life.” ~Ketut Liyer p. 241
“Americans know entertainment, but they don’t know pleasure.” ~Luca Spaghetti
“Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens.” p. 155
“Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being – and a normal one, at that?” p. 157
Eat, Pray, Love Quotes on God and Heaven
“I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.”
“There is a reason they call God a presence – because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.”
“Saint Anthony said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.” P. 326
“God is an experience of supreme love.”
“‘Our whole business therefore in this life,’ wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, ‘is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.’” p. 123
“God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are.” p. 192
“God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.”
“Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.” p. 156
“We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. This is a classic example of what they call in the East ‘wrong-thinking’.” p. 192
“To know God, you need only to renounce one thing – your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.” p. 192
“Same thing that is God is same thing inside me. Same-same.” ~Ketut Liyer p. 233
“You have been to hell, Ketut?”
He smiled. Of course he’s been there.
What’s it like in hell?”
Same like in heaven,” he said.
He saw my confusion and tried to explain. “Universe is a circle, Liss.”
He said. “To up, to down — all same, at end.”
I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below.
I asked. “Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?”
Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss.” He laughed.
Same-same,” he said. “Same in end, so better to be happy in journey.”
I said, “So, if heaven is love, then hell is.. “
Love, too,” he said.
Ketut laughed again, “Always so difficult for young people to understand this!”
p. 262
Quotes on Prayer
“Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don’t have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.”
“There’s no trouble in this world so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.”
“Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender”
“Where did you get the idea you aren’t allowed to petition the universe with prayer? You are part of this universe, Liz. You’re a constituent – you have every entitlement to participate in the actions of the universe, and to let your feelings be known. So put your opinion out there. Make your case. Believe me – it will at least be taken into consideration.” ~Iva p. 32
“There’s a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, “Dear saint-please, please, please…give me the grace to win the lottery.” This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, “My son-please, please, please…buy a ticket.”
Quotes on Sadness, Unhappiness, Loneliness, and Grief
“Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.”
“As I focus on diligent joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once — that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-‘n’-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. 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.”
“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.”
“They flank me – depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show their badges. I know these guys very well. … Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that.”
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”
“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
“I was full of a hot, powerful sadness and would have loved to burst into the comfort of tears, but tried hard not to. Remembering something my Guru once said – that you should never give yourself the chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.” p. 137
Eat, Pray, Love Quotes on Heart-Break, Break-Ups, and Divorce
“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.” ~Felipe p. 277
“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.”
“I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. 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 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.”
“When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.”
“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.”
“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”
“How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it?”
“I see marriage as an operation that sews two people together, and divorce is a kind of amputation that can take a long time to heal. The longer you were married, or the rougher the amputation, the harder it is to recover.” ~the plumber / poet from New Zealand
“Getting out of a marriage is rough, though, and not just for the legal / financial complications or the massive lifestyle upheaval. (As my friend Deborah once advised me wisely: ‘Nobody ever died from splitting up furniture.’) It’s the emotional recoil that kills you.”
Transformational Quotes
“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”
Note: I believe this quote may actually come from the movie because I didn’t see it in the section about the Augusteum in the book. See the section I’m referencing below.
“In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.”
“To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business – not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into…rhetoric and plot.” p. 114
“I’m letting myself be held” p. 277
“The Balinese don’t wait and see ‘how things go.’ That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart.” p. 228
“I think I deserve something beautiful.”
“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.” ~ Bob
“I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whose I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough – but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”
Love, Intimacy, and Soul Mate Quotes
“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.” ~ Ketut Liyer
“I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
“Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance.”
“One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else’s body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn’t there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient’s body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: “Do you want your belly pressed against this person’s belly forever –or not?”
“But my heart said to my mind in the dark silence of that beach: ‘I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you.” P 328
“Big deal. So you fell in love with someone. Don’t you see what happened? This guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching. I mean you got zapped, kiddo. But that love you felt, that’s just the beginning. You just got a taste of love. That’s just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. Wait till you see how much more deeply you can love than that. Heck, Groceries – you have the capacity to someday love the whole world. It’s your destiny. Don’t laugh.” ~Richard from Texas p. 149
“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 own 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. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can’t let this one go. It’s over, Groceries.
David’s purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of your marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it.”
“Problem is, you can’t accept that his relationship had a real short shelf life. You’re like a dog at the dump, baby – you’re just lickin’ at the empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you’re not careful, that can’s gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it.“
But I love him.”
“So love him.”
“But I miss him.”
“So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it. You’re just afraid to let go of the last bits of David because then you’ll be really alone, and Liz Gilbert is scared to death of what will happen if she’s really alone. But here’s what you gotta understand, Groceries. If you clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using right now to obsess about this guy, you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot – a doorway. And guess what the universe will do with the doorway? It will rush in – God will rush in – and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop using David to block that door. Let it go.” ~Richard from Texas p.149
Self-Empowerment, Authenticity, and Overall Self Quotes
“Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years–I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.”
“Still, I will say that the same thing which has helped generations of Sicilians hold their dignity has helped me being to recover mine – namely, the idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity.” Pg 115
“What do I believe that I deserve in this life?”
“We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.”
“Perhaps this is a good way of estimating age as any – how old do you feel?” p. 239
“The wise man is always similar to himself.” ~Sextus (ancient Pythagorean philosopher) p. 192
“But I have a brave heart!” p. 160
“Your treasure – your perfection – is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter the silence of the heart. The kundalini shakti – the supreme energy of the divine – will take you there.” p. 197
“I’ve come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call “The Physics of The Quest” — a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: “If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself… then truth will not be withheld from you.” Or so I’ve come to believe.”
A Note on My Quote Curation Process
As a longtime quote lover, I’m deeply moved by quotes. Most of the Eat, Pray, Love quotes in this round-up were highlighted by me as I read through the book on my first, second, or even fifth pass.
There’s always a new gem for me to discover in this beautiful book.
As I was researching popular quotes to also include, I discovered quite a few errors and mis-attributions on various web sites. I may have even made some myself, though I did my best to cross-check as much as I could. I compared quite a few of the quotes to the book itself to be doubly sure. But if you do see any errors on my part, please let me know. 😉
A quick note on page numbers: as I prepared this blog post, I noticed that some people were looking for page numbers for the quotes. Whilst I wasn’t able to collect the page numbers for all of the quotes, I’ve captured what I could find. And I’ll update more when I find them. I’ll also share a picture of my version of the book (see above photo) since the page numbers may be different in different print versions.
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Thank you for stopping by and checking out my round-up of the 100+ Best Eat, Pray, Love Quotes (From Elizabeth Gilbert’s Beloved Book). Hope you found some quotes to love and they support your journey.
And if you haven’t already read Eat, Pray, Love, then I highly recommend giving it a go! It really helped me during my own divorce journey and healing.