“Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert is a popular memoir that has inspired many with its wisdom and introspective quotes. Here are best quotes from the book.
“The only way to get what you really want is to let go of what you don’t want.”
Eat Pray Love Quotes
“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
“You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.”
“I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.”
“Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark.”
“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
“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.”
“A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”
“You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.”
“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.”
“Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship — a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.”
“To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.”
“You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”
“Our senses don’t just make the world available to us, they also make the world real to us.”
“It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.”
“In the end, I’ve come to believe in something I call ‘The Physics of the Quest.’ A force in nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity.”
“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”
“You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
“To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon the verdant green hills is the most perfect refreshment.”
“A person’s relationship with their ego can be a life’s work.”
“I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.”
“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.”
“The appreciation of pleasure can be the anchor of humanity.”
“Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.”
“I was perfectly happy in my boring life, so what was the problem?”
“When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.”
“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.”
“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.”
“So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it.”
“At some point, you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.”
“Holding people away from you, and denying yourself love, that doesn’t make you strong. if anything, it makes you weaker. Because you’re doing it out of fear.”
“You don’t have to be a martyr, you don’t have to take on other people’s suffering as your own, you don’t have to die to the self and abandon your worldly possessions in order to attain enlightenment.”
“I was full of natural happiness, or at least natural strength. But my mind was racing. I wished I could have been as quickly confident as I was quickly frightened. But that’s just the way it goes, I suppose.”
“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 is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention.”
“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.”
“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?'”
“Traveling is the great true love of my life… I am loyal and constant in my love of travel. 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.”
“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?”
“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
These quotes capture some of the key themes and insights from “Eat, Pray, Love,” which explores the author’s journey of self-discovery, healing, and finding balance in life through travel and introspection.
