Favourite quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat Pray Love’

Credit: Penguin Group

Eat Pray Love book quotes

Here are my favourite quotes from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love:

1) “This is a sweet expression. Il bel far niente means ‘the beauty of doing nothing.’ [IT] is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated.”

2) “This morning, instead of fighting it, I just stopped.”

3) “Resting place of the mind is the heart.”

4) “Here’s what you gotta understand. If you clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using right now to obsess, you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot—a doorway. And guess what that universe will do with that doorway? It will rush in.”

5) “I 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.”

6) “To lose balance is sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”

7) “I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’—the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. The problem with all this swinging through the vines of thoughts is that you are never where you are.”

8) “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. We all need such places of ritual safe keeping. You are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising.”

9) “Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Americans don’t really know how to do nothing.”

10) “Send him some love and light every time you thing about him, then drop it.”

11) “But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one’s life, is it so awful to…nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?”

12) “Then I went for a walk and ate some pistachio gelato. Which Italians consider a perfectly reasonable thing to be eating at 9:30 a.m. and frankly I could not agree with them more.”

13) “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.”

14) “Your ego’s job isn’t to serve you. Its only job is to keep itself in power.”

15) “But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.”