Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.

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

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear 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.

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.

This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

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.

Operation Self-Esteem – Day F*****g One.

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.[The Bhagavad Gita – that ancient Indian Yogic text]

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.

In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.