Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia hit the bookstands in 2006 to mixed reviews but extraordinary success, staying on the New York Times bestseller list for 187 weeks. In 2010, the book by Elizabeth Gilbert was adapted into a movie starring Julia Roberts. While many critics did not enjoy either the book or the movie, Eat, Pray, Love sold well both as a book and remains a popular movie which has inspired many women to travel to Europe and take an exploratory view toward their life.
The memoir covers Elizabeth Gilbert’s life as she struggles with divorce and a failed rebound relationship. She decided to travel and sort out her life. In Italy, she indulges in a great deal of fine cuisine. In India, she spends three months in an Ashram learning to meditate. In Bali, she falls in love with a man that she later marries. Overall, it is a very romantic comedy and women have loved this movie for many years!
Eat Pray Love Quotes
The 45 inspirational quotes below are taken from the memoir and the movie.
- “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. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.”
- “To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
- “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.”
- “We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.”
- “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.”
- “Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.”
- “Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed.”
- “We must take care of our families, wherever we find them.”
- “I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.”
- “This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
- “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 leave.”
- “Om Namah Shivaya, meaning, I honor the divinity that resides within me.”
- “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. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.”
- “At some point, you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.”
- “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 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.”
- “You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.”
- “Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine. You want to stay near the core of the thing – right in the hub of the wheel – not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness – that’s your heart. That’s where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you’ll always find peace.”
- “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. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.”
- “Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship – a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.”
- “But if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.”
- “There 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.”
- “When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.”
- “God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.”
- “There’s a reason we refer to ‘leaps of faith’ – because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don’t care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn’t. If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be – by definition – faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be… a prudent insurance policy.”
- “The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure… I’m lonely… I’m a failure… I’m lonely…) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.”
- “Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.”
- “I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that 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. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.”
- “The 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.”
- “I wondered, ‘Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?‘”
- “That’s the thing about a human life – there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”
- “I thought of how many people go to their graves forgiven and unforgiving. I thought of how many people have had siblings or friends or children or lovers disappear from their lives before precious words of clemency or absolution could be passed along. How do the survivors of terminated relationships ever endure the pain of unfinished business? From that place of meditation, I found the answer-you can finish the business yourself, from within yourself. It’s not only possible, it’s essential.”
- “One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”
- “The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement.”
- “God is an experience of supreme love.”
- “It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainment.”
- “As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you.”
- “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. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
- “Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.”
- “If you clear out all of that space in your mind you would have a doorway.”
- “Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one…This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.”
- “We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.”
- “What worked yesterday doesn’t always work today.”
- “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. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping.”
- “Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.”
- “Well, just remember–all your misery will be waiting for you at the door upon your exit, should you care to pick it up again when you leave.”
Related: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Quotes
Eat Pray Love Video Trailer
This is the official movie trailer which will remind you of the romantic, adventurous nature of the movie. Check it out – always a fun watch! The movie was released in the United States in August 2010. In the movie Julia Roberts plays Liz Gilbert as a modern woman who is on a quest to travel the world, experience new things and connect with her “true self.”
Liz is at a crossroads in her life after her husband unexpectedly divorces her. So she takes a year long sabbatical from her job and takes an uncharacteristic lead from her job and gets out of her comfort zone. In the prices she takes a journey where she risks everything to change her life. In her exotic travels, she experiences the simple pleasures of eating pasta in Italy, praying in India and finally the inner peace and balance of love in Bali. The movie was an adaptation of the book and serves as a reminder that there are many ways to let yourself go from your own role and expectations and journey to see the world.
Related: New Love Quotes– they may help you find someone!
Conclusion
“Eat, Pray, Love” inspired many women to change their lives, and to find the bliss that is within us all. May these quotes help you remember that happiness, love, and bliss generally arrive when you are not looking for them.
Slow down, settle in, and relax. These 45 inspirational quotes from the book and the movie remind us to look within, where we will find what we are seeking.
Image Credit: Steve Jurvetson from Menlo Park, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
I’m Alice Judy and AnQuotes is a fun hobby for me. We know that everyone loves a great quote and our mission here is simple – to be the best and most interesting quote site in the world! If you have quotes you would like us to cover, please contact us.
