Rachel > Rachel's Quotes

“My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into a tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is anther force operating here as well-the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship - just so long as those prayers are sincere.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I was doing something I'd never done before. And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Everyone makes their own path, and I must make mine. The Bhagavad Gita - and 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 perfectly. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly. It is mine.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift-or curse, perhaps-of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“creative people always suffer from depression because we're so
super sensitive and special?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“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 to not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom 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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this earth to do?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Devotion is diligence without assurance. 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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy."

“Women’s sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women as to see themselves in a relationship of connection…I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein that have quietly buried in many neat rows– the personal dreams they have given up for their families…(Women) have a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept.”

“The cold ugly fact is that marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. From studies, married men perform dazzingly better in life, live longer, accumulate more, excel at careers, report to be happier, less likely to die from a violent death, suffer less from alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression than single man…The reverse is not true. In fact, every fact is reverse, single women fare much better than married women. On average, married women take a 7% pay cut. All of this adds up to what Sociologists called the “Marriage Benefit Imbalance”…It is important to pause here and inspect why so women long for it (marriage) so deeply.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“He was playing a character I had invented,
which is somewhat telling. In desperate love, it's always like this,
isn't it? 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...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“meditation vs prayer = listening vs talking”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is American, too-the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“in stillness, I watched myselfget eaten by mosquitoes... the itch was maddening at first but eventually it just melded into a general burning feeling and i rode that heat to a mld euphoria. I allowed the pain to lose its specific associations and become pure sensation... and that eventually lifted me out of myself and into meditation. ”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“From 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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi