10 Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes to Set Your Heart Ablaze

Learn from Elizabeth IRL in O’ahu this year—including an intimate deep dive into creativity with her Big Magic Creativity Immersion. Tickets on sale now!

Elizabeth Gilbert inspired a generation of suburbanites-turned-seekers to find their true north by tapping into long-buried inner truths: You are capable and worthy of following your heart’s desire through travel. After Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth reminded us of the potential of creativity and manifestation with Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. She’s like the fairy godmother that bippity-bops us into harnessing our personal power, no lost slippers required.

We can’t wait to learn in with Elizabeth IRL at Wanderlust O’ahu this year! Spend an intimate day with the worldwide best-selling author for a unique personal development Immersion on Thursday, February 28. Elizabeth will be talking about what she considers to be the 5 major necessary emotional components of living a creative life: Courage, Enchantment, Permission, Persistence and Trust, and guiding participants through writing exercises and other creative expression. To prepare, we’re looking back at some of her most inspirational advice. Read on for 10 quotes from her books that we come back to again and again. For tickets and more information about O’ahu, click here.


On Relationships

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

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on miraculous. – Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

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 so you can change your life. – Eat, Pray, Love

Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect. – Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

On Power

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. – Eat, Pray, Love

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. – Big Magic

You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be. – Eat, Pray, Love

So this, I believe, is the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you? – Big Magic

On Depression

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. – Eat, Pray, Love

When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore. – Eat, Pray, Love

Don’t miss your chance to learn from Elizabeth at Wanderlust O’ahu this year!