Eat, Pray, Love Favorite Quotes

In honor of Eat, Pray, Love the movie coming out this weekend I decided to take a look back at the novel and pull from it my favorite parts. This has become a very important book for me in terms of a place to go to for advice, an inspiration to live the way you want and to figure out how to do what you love. I've read and re-read it a couple of times now and it never ceases to amaze me (and make me a little jealous) of the year Elizabeth Gilbert had during the writing of Eat, Pray, Love. So here is a list of my favorite quotes- quotes I find funny, inspirational, full of advice and that really touched me.

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Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth- Sheryl Louise Moller

This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.

Go back to bed...because you don't need to know the final answer right now, at three o'clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. Go back to bed because the only thing you need to do right now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer. Go back to bed so that when the tempest comes you'll be strong enough to deal with it.

I was actually feeling kind of delighted about all the compartments of time and space that were appearing in my days, during which I could ask myself the radical new question, “What do you want to do today Liz?”

When I realized that the only question at hand was how do I define pleasure? and that I was truly in a country where people would permit me to explore that question freely, everything changed. Everything became delicious. All I had to do was ask myself every day for the first time in my life, “What would you enjoy doing today Liz? What would bring you pleasure right now?” With nobody else's agenda to consider and no other obligations to worry about, this question finally became distilled and absolutely self specific.

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.

Moreover, I have boundary issues with men...to have issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place right? But I disappear into the person I love....if I love you, you can have everything. you can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dogs money, my dogs time- everything......I will give you all this and more until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else. I do not relay these facts about myself with pride but this is how its always been.

There's a constant level of closeness that I really need from the person I love...but it just destroys me to not be able to count on that affection when I need it.

What are my choices to be? What do I believe that I deserve in this life? where can I accept sacrifice and where can I not?

It's for the best. I know it is. 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. 

Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion we are only robots.

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 and also your entitlement as a human being to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight.

When I ask my mind to rest in stillness it is astonishing how quickly it will turn 1. bored 2. angry 3. depressed 4. anxious or 5. all of the above. 

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.

Your problem is that you don't understand what the 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 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 come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you then they leave. They tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so an new light could get in make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life...

That's your problem. You're wishing too much baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone outta be.

You've got some serious control issues...You're a powerful woman and you're used to getting what you want out of life and you didn't get what you wanted in your last few relationships and its got you all jammed up. Your husband didn't behave the way you wanted and David didn't either. Life didn't go your way for once. And nothing pisses off a control freak more than life not goin' her way.

You gotta learn how to let go, Groceries. Otherwise you're gonna make yourself sick. Never gonna have a good night's sleep again. You'll just toss and turn forever beatin' yourself for being such a fiasco in life. “Whats wrong with me? How come i screw up all my relationships? Why am i such a failure?”

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

What I'm alarmed to find in meditation is that my mind is actually not that interesting a place after all. In actuality I really only think about a few things and I think about them constantly. I believe the official term is "brooding."

In our real lives we are constantly hopping around to adjust ourselves around discomfort- physical emotional and psychological- in order to evade the reality of grief and nuisance. Vipassana Meditation teaches that grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life but if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough you will in time experience the truth that everything both uncomfortable and love does eventually pass. I wondered whether it might serve me and those who are burdened with the task of loving me if I could learn to stay still and endure a bit more without always getting dragged along on the potholed road of circumstance.

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”...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.

Take the time to heal but don't forget to eventually share your hear with someone.

To meditate only you must smile. Smile with your face smile, with your mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile with your liver.

He says, “Dude- why is life and crazy like this?”

I keep remembering one of my guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck something that will 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.....And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it.

Wayan ticked off on her fingers 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 hear that this is destiny.

What is this life? Do you understand? I don't.

Do you think any of us know what were doing? Do you think there's any ways humans can love each other without complication?...It's still two human beings trying to get along so its going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we tried for something.

It is strange and true that sometimes intense emotion can cause us to respond to cataclysmic news in exactly the opposite manner logic might dictate. This is absolute value of human emotion- joyful events can sometimes register on the Richter scale as pure trauma and dreadful grief makes us sometimes burst out laughing.

I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast 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....many times in romance I have been the victim of my own optimism.

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

Why am I worrying about this, by the way? What have I not yet learned about the futility of worry?

What's your favorite quote? Have a quote you like that I missed? Leave a comment!