01c. 1969 ADMy heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: "I want a spiritual teacher.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
02c. 1969 ADI love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
03c. 1969 ADVenice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don't really want to live in it.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
04c. 1969 ADThe resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
05c. 1969 ADYou have been to hell, Ketut?"He smiled. Of course he's been there.What's it like in hell?" Same like in heaven," he said.He saw my confusion and tried to explain. "Universe is a circle, Liss."He said. "To up, to down -- all same, at end."I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below. I asked. "Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?"Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss." He laughed.Same-same," he said. "Same in end, so better to be happy in journey."I said, "So, if heaven is love, then hell is.. " Love, too," he said. Ketut laughed again, "Always so difficult for young people to understand this!Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
06c. 1969 ADAt that moment of realization (that union with God is always present), that's when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last compassionate, unspoken message:You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
07c. 1969 ADSo I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing -- a spontaneous handstand--isn't something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
08c. 1969 ADWhy they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile.(From Ketut Liyer, the Balinese healer)Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
09c. 1969 ADEvery religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
10c. 1969 ADFlexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline. Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
11c. 1969 ADAs the saying goes, "Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them." Why would I want to keep my limitations?Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
12c. 1969 ADFear is a desolate boneyard where our dreams go to desiccate in the hot sun.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
13c. 1969 ADPeople 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, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
14c. 1969 ADI am touched that you are trying to comprehend me. A friend could not be more loving.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
15c. 1969 ADThe inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
16c. 1969 ADClearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
17c. 1969 ADIndeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying","We understand how it is - we have one, too.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
18c. 1969 ADWhen she was pregnant with her second child, a midwife asked if Catherine had any unspoken fears about anything that could go wrong with the baby - such as genetic defects or complications during the birth. My sister said, 'My only fear is that he might grow up to become a Republican.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
19c. 1969 ADthe great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
20c. 1969 ADThe 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. .. Even in the Eternal City (Rome), says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
21c. 1969 ADIn a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
22c. 1969 ADTo devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into… rhetoric and plot.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
23c. 1969 ADSo whenever that brittle voice of dissatisfaction emerges within me, I can say "Ah, my ego! There you are, old friend!" It's the same thing when I'm being criticized and I notice myself reaching with outrage, heartache, or defensiveness. It's just my ego, flaring up and testing its power. In such circumstances, I have learned to watch my heated emotions carefully, but I try not to take them too seriously, because I know that it's merely my ego that has been wounded--never my soul It is merely my ego that wants revenge, or to win the biggest prize. It is merely my ego that wants to start a Twitter war against a hater, or to sulk at an insult or to quit in righteous indignation because I didn't get the outcome I wanted. "At such times, I can always steady my life one more by returning to my soul. I ask it, "And what is it that you want, dear one?""The answer is always the same: "More wonder, please.""As long as I'm still moving in that direction---toward wonder--then I know I will always be fine in my soul, which is where it counts. And since creativity is still the most effective way for me to access wonder, I choose it.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
24c. 1969 ADThere is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.Elizabeth Gilbert / quote ↗
