Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

We suddenly saw how people reacted in the event of massive social upheaval, and the way that the little problems in your life don't go away. You don't stop being frightened of spiders just because the world's blown up.

I don’t know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net.

I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.

All over the world, relationships between men and women are very, very tricky and very difficult and you don't learn anything. It's not an exact science, so you can't learn anything. You're always going by instinct and your instinct betrays you because you want what you want when you want it.

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

You never know how people are going to respond.

I suddenly remember something I've been told about fear. That amid a hail of machine gun fire you notice the existence of your skin.

The more I've acted, I've realised that I have a) no control of and b) no way of really quite understanding how people react to anything I do, or any movie I do.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

You can never trust a human being to behave as you would have expected in a given circumstance

Love is random; fear is inevitable.

The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.

It is not strange that some of our revoltes preach trial marriage: for the only safe way to marry them at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely experienced all the human situations with them, you would have no means of knowing how, in any given situation, they would behave. They might conform about evening-dress, and throw plates between courses; they might be charming to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit down and finish dinner with you. Or they might in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. The point is that you would never know.

We do not know what we can bear until we are put to the test. Many a delicate mother, who thought that she could not survive the death of her children, has lived to bury her husband and the last one of a large family, and in addition to all this has seen her home and last dollar swept away; yet she has had the courage to bear it all and to go on as before. When the need comes, there is a power deep within us that answers the call.

Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act.

My knowledge of the human psyche is as yet imperfect. Certain areas won't yield to computation.

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.

When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.

You become more animalistic when you don't know what's coming next - you have to be on guard, but at the same time you're also more receptive.

The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart.

If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.