Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

Evil, as evil, can never be chosen; and though evil is often the effect of our own choice, yet we never desire it but under the appearance of an imaginary good.

No move towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes has taken place in the five or six thousand years that the world has existed.

It's one of the most basic laws of human nature, isn't it? The more we are denied something, the more we want it. The more silence given to this or that topic, the more power.

I'm a human being and I fall in love and sometimes I don't have control of every situation.

I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.

The truth about love is that you don't always fall in love with whom you are supposed to fall in love with. Love just hits you. It is a transcendent thing. Sometimes it is your best friend's husband and sometimes it's your father. It's weird. But that's a fact of life.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.

The masses will reject any theory, however reasonable it may be, if it lays a restriction upon the appetite.

You can't strategize falling in love, can you? It's never worked. People love you the most and set you up, and it doesn't work because you can't predict these things. You fall in love serially.

In sex, man is driven into the very abyss which he flees. He makes a voyage to non-being and back.

The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.

It is the human wish to be told lies that keep us as primitive morally and socially as we are. I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for mere reason to kill.

The world admits bears in pits do it, Even Pekingeses at the Ritz do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love.

When you know what a man wants you know who he is, and how to move him.

Humans hardly know what they want, how they want it, or when they want it.

That "ol' black magic" is a fickle force. The chemistry of romantic love can trigger the chemistry of sexual desire and the fuel of sexual desire can trigger the fuel of romance. This is why it is dangerous to copulate with someone with whom you don't wish to become involved. Although you intend to have casual sex, you might just fall in love.

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want?

The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice

The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire.

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?

No one is contented in this world, I believe. There is always something left to desire, and the last thing longed for always seems the most necessary to happiness.