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They say that there are three kinds of people in the world. There are people who never learn one way or another anything there are people who learn from their own mistakes, eventually and with great pain and then there are the really wise people who learn from other people's mistakes and spare themselves the suffering.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 18
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Waterbury
Connecticut
Really
Suffering
Way
Learn
Spare
Never
Pain
Spares
World
Three
Eventually
People
Another
Kinds
Anything
Mistakes
Great
Wise
Kind
Mistake

More quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert

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I think sometimes we look at other people's marriages and we think they must always be so happy together. I don't know anybody who's married for a long time who hasn't somehow made room in their love story for the hate and resentment that they sometimes feel toward each other.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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The thing that I do try to convey is, don't do what I did - but ask what I asked.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life..what happened was that I started to pray.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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You might get nothing out of it at all except a beautiful, long life where all you did was follow your gorgeous curiosity. And that should be enough too.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Nobody wants to do it - not real change, not soul change, not the painful molecular change required to truly become who you need to be. Nobody ever does real transformation for fun. Nobody ever does it on a dare. You do it only when your back is so far against the wall that you have no choice anymore.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?
Elizabeth Gilbert
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It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I am a better person when I have less on my plate.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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You make some big grandoise decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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When you write a novel, there’s a level at which you are much more revealing about who you are because you’re less self-conscious about how you’re presenting yourself. You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it’s all coming from you.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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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.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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We alter and customize the thing every century, every generation, every day - both in the courts and in our own homes. And marriage accepts our modifications gracefully. Marriage adapts, evolves and (in a manner that I find miraculous and kind of inspiring) somehow keeps chugging along.
Elizabeth Gilbert