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Elizabeth Gilbert

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What is the overgiver getting out of this obviously imbalanced arrangement?

Or at least, what do they think they’re getting?

Because nobody overgives for no reason—even if those reasons are deeply hidden or disguised as acts of pure altruism.

So what is the payoff, exactly?
In my case, the payoff has always been love—or at least, the desperate hope of love.

And how far am I willing to go—how much will I extend myself, exhaust myself, burn myself out, or manipulate, seduce, soothe, manage, and control others—in order to get my own hidden needs and hungers met?

Are you kidding me?
To earn love?
I will give up everything I have.
I will overgive myself right to the edge of annihilation.

But only always.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
This book is not only for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by their own addictions or by the addictions of others—although I do believe those two categories will include pretty much all of us, at some time or another. This book is also about the many ways that people—despite their best efforts at living sane and stable lives—can sometimes get swept into high-octane dramas and traumas, finding themselves washed up on shores that can feel very distant from their true natures.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
On the surface, I appeared to be a confident young go-getter. But my inner life was, as it had always been, a tremulous fear-scape. I was neither mature nor emotionally secure, and I wasn’t yet ready for the demands of adulthood. Hidden beneath all my apparent ingenuity was a terrified child constantly asking, “Who’s got me? Who will keep me safe? Where do I belong?” And thus I began my lifelong quest to make other people into my home.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Inspirational, Motivational
You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Here’s the thing about withdrawal, from any drug, substance, person, or behavior: The reason it’s so excruciating is that not only do you have to feel the pain of losing access to that thing you desire more than anything else, but you also have to feel the pain of every other loss you have ever experienced along your life’s journey. All the previous failures, all the previous crashes, all the previous disappointments. It’s like a twenty-car pileup of failures on an icy highway, and there’s no way to get away from it. Worst of all, withdrawal forces you to feel your original suffering again—the deepest childhood grief or ancestral wound that started you out on this journey of addiction in the first place.

And who wants to feel that?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I can’t even tell you when my love addiction got triggered with Rayya, or when I collapsed into the utter abandonment of self that is codependency in its most deadly and life-destroying form. I can’t name the exact moment when I made her into my higher power, or when I surrendered all my will and agency to her, or when I decided that it was my job in life to serve her every desire—no matter how much it cost me, physically, emotionally, or financially.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Child, you keep demanding impossible promises from those who cannot even take care of themselves.
But what joy have you ever derived from being so dependent and unassured, so needy, lost, and afraid?
You keep saying you want to count on somebody—
but I say stop counting.
You keep telling me you crave security because the world frightens you.
But the world, my love, is what you are.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
How the hell did I get here? is a question that I believe everybody will have to face at some point during their passage through life. Perhaps even at multiple points. For who among us has never gotten lost, much to our own embarrassment? Who has not ended up in scenarios that are frightening, alienating, shameful, and spirit-crushing? Who has not kept secrets, or been betrayed, or tried to control the behavior of others? Who has not longed for escape from suffering? And who has not reached for substances, people, behaviors, or distractions that offer temporary respite from the built-in discomforts of existence itself?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
The line between a problematic behavior and an addiction is a murky one—perhaps even invisible. But a good test as to whether you’re an addict or not is to answer these three questions as honestly as possible: 1. Have you tried to stop this behavior and you can’t? 2. Have you managed to stop at times—but you can’t stay stopped? 3. Has your behavior brought consequences to your life that might cause a normal person to say, “Wow, I’ll certainly never do that thing again!”—yet you keep doing that thing?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie as a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble.
From Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Motivational
Your tears are my prayers.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Hope
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
From Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
If Satan existed, he could scarcely do better at seeding pain and destruction than to hide himself within the human mind, saying things like “You’re a failure and a fuckup, nobody understands you, you deserve some escape, you should probably just go drink something, or overeat, or spend a bunch of money, or fuck somebody, or take command over someone else’s existence, or blow up your own life, or just kill yourself—but don’t tell anybody I said any of this.” (Satan: translated from the Hebrew as “the accuser”—a shadowy internal figure I know all too intimately.)
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
There are not a lot of women out there who will publicly admit to being sex and love addicts, because it sounds pretty gnarly. In fact, it is gnarly. I won’t get into salacious details here, but I will say that my addiction manifests as a sincere yet deeply misguided belief that somebody outside of myself will miraculously be able to heal me on the inside—thereby making me feel safe, cherished, and whole at last. In real-life terms, this translates as a desperate need to have my existence constantly authenticated and re-authenticated through a romantic partner’s touch, eye contact, verbal reassurance, acts of love, or mere physical presence. How much reassurance is enough for me to finally feel secure? There has never been enough, frankly. There can never be enough.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
It’s worth questioning, in every partnership: Who is playing the traditional role of the woman here?—meaning, Who is pouring more care and nourishment into this relationship (or project, or institution)? And who is the beneficiary of all that care and nourishment? And what is the cost to the overgiver?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker," he continued, as though he had not heard her. "We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.
From The Signature of All Things
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Philosophical
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
As I focus on diligent joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once -- that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together -- in misery, but happy to not be apart.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
What is the overgiver getting out of this obviously imbalanced arrangement?

Or at least, what do they think they’re getting?

Because nobody overgives for no reason—even if those reasons are deeply hidden or disguised as acts of pure altruism.

So what is the payoff, exactly?
In my case, the payoff has always been love—or at least, the desperate hope of love.

And how far am I willing to go—how much will I extend myself, exhaust myself, burn myself out, or manipulate, seduce, soothe, manage, and control others—in order to get my own hidden needs and hungers met?

Are you kidding me?
To earn love?
I will give up everything I have.
I will overgive myself right to the edge of annihilation.

But only always.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
This book is not only for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by their own addictions or by the addictions of others—although I do believe those two categories will include pretty much all of us, at some time or another. This book is also about the many ways that people—despite their best efforts at living sane and stable lives—can sometimes get swept into high-octane dramas and traumas, finding themselves washed up on shores that can feel very distant from their true natures.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
On the surface, I appeared to be a confident young go-getter. But my inner life was, as it had always been, a tremulous fear-scape. I was neither mature nor emotionally secure, and I wasn’t yet ready for the demands of adulthood. Hidden beneath all my apparent ingenuity was a terrified child constantly asking, “Who’s got me? Who will keep me safe? Where do I belong?” And thus I began my lifelong quest to make other people into my home.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Inspirational, Motivational
You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Here’s the thing about withdrawal, from any drug, substance, person, or behavior: The reason it’s so excruciating is that not only do you have to feel the pain of losing access to that thing you desire more than anything else, but you also have to feel the pain of every other loss you have ever experienced along your life’s journey. All the previous failures, all the previous crashes, all the previous disappointments. It’s like a twenty-car pileup of failures on an icy highway, and there’s no way to get away from it. Worst of all, withdrawal forces you to feel your original suffering again—the deepest childhood grief or ancestral wound that started you out on this journey of addiction in the first place.

And who wants to feel that?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I can’t even tell you when my love addiction got triggered with Rayya, or when I collapsed into the utter abandonment of self that is codependency in its most deadly and life-destroying form. I can’t name the exact moment when I made her into my higher power, or when I surrendered all my will and agency to her, or when I decided that it was my job in life to serve her every desire—no matter how much it cost me, physically, emotionally, or financially.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Child, you keep demanding impossible promises from those who cannot even take care of themselves.
But what joy have you ever derived from being so dependent and unassured, so needy, lost, and afraid?
You keep saying you want to count on somebody—
but I say stop counting.
You keep telling me you crave security because the world frightens you.
But the world, my love, is what you are.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
How the hell did I get here? is a question that I believe everybody will have to face at some point during their passage through life. Perhaps even at multiple points. For who among us has never gotten lost, much to our own embarrassment? Who has not ended up in scenarios that are frightening, alienating, shameful, and spirit-crushing? Who has not kept secrets, or been betrayed, or tried to control the behavior of others? Who has not longed for escape from suffering? And who has not reached for substances, people, behaviors, or distractions that offer temporary respite from the built-in discomforts of existence itself?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
The line between a problematic behavior and an addiction is a murky one—perhaps even invisible. But a good test as to whether you’re an addict or not is to answer these three questions as honestly as possible: 1. Have you tried to stop this behavior and you can’t? 2. Have you managed to stop at times—but you can’t stay stopped? 3. Has your behavior brought consequences to your life that might cause a normal person to say, “Wow, I’ll certainly never do that thing again!”—yet you keep doing that thing?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie as a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble.
From Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Motivational
Your tears are my prayers.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Hope
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
From Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
If Satan existed, he could scarcely do better at seeding pain and destruction than to hide himself within the human mind, saying things like “You’re a failure and a fuckup, nobody understands you, you deserve some escape, you should probably just go drink something, or overeat, or spend a bunch of money, or fuck somebody, or take command over someone else’s existence, or blow up your own life, or just kill yourself—but don’t tell anybody I said any of this.” (Satan: translated from the Hebrew as “the accuser”—a shadowy internal figure I know all too intimately.)
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
There are not a lot of women out there who will publicly admit to being sex and love addicts, because it sounds pretty gnarly. In fact, it is gnarly. I won’t get into salacious details here, but I will say that my addiction manifests as a sincere yet deeply misguided belief that somebody outside of myself will miraculously be able to heal me on the inside—thereby making me feel safe, cherished, and whole at last. In real-life terms, this translates as a desperate need to have my existence constantly authenticated and re-authenticated through a romantic partner’s touch, eye contact, verbal reassurance, acts of love, or mere physical presence. How much reassurance is enough for me to finally feel secure? There has never been enough, frankly. There can never be enough.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
It’s worth questioning, in every partnership: Who is playing the traditional role of the woman here?—meaning, Who is pouring more care and nourishment into this relationship (or project, or institution)? And who is the beneficiary of all that care and nourishment? And what is the cost to the overgiver?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker," he continued, as though he had not heard her. "We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.
From The Signature of All Things
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Philosophical
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
As I focus on diligent joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once -- that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together -- in misery, but happy to not be apart.
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
What is the overgiver getting out of this obviously imbalanced arrangement?

Or at least, what do they think they’re getting?

Because nobody overgives for no reason—even if those reasons are deeply hidden or disguised as acts of pure altruism.

So what is the payoff, exactly?
In my case, the payoff has always been love—or at least, the desperate hope of love.

And how far am I willing to go—how much will I extend myself, exhaust myself, burn myself out, or manipulate, seduce, soothe, manage, and control others—in order to get my own hidden needs and hungers met?

Are you kidding me?
To earn love?
I will give up everything I have.
I will overgive myself right to the edge of annihilation.

But only always.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
This book is not only for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by their own addictions or by the addictions of others—although I do believe those two categories will include pretty much all of us, at some time or another. This book is also about the many ways that people—despite their best efforts at living sane and stable lives—can sometimes get swept into high-octane dramas and traumas, finding themselves washed up on shores that can feel very distant from their true natures.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
On the surface, I appeared to be a confident young go-getter. But my inner life was, as it had always been, a tremulous fear-scape. I was neither mature nor emotionally secure, and I wasn’t yet ready for the demands of adulthood. Hidden beneath all my apparent ingenuity was a terrified child constantly asking, “Who’s got me? Who will keep me safe? Where do I belong?” And thus I began my lifelong quest to make other people into my home.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Inspirational, Motivational
You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Here’s the thing about withdrawal, from any drug, substance, person, or behavior: The reason it’s so excruciating is that not only do you have to feel the pain of losing access to that thing you desire more than anything else, but you also have to feel the pain of every other loss you have ever experienced along your life’s journey. All the previous failures, all the previous crashes, all the previous disappointments. It’s like a twenty-car pileup of failures on an icy highway, and there’s no way to get away from it. Worst of all, withdrawal forces you to feel your original suffering again—the deepest childhood grief or ancestral wound that started you out on this journey of addiction in the first place.

And who wants to feel that?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I can’t even tell you when my love addiction got triggered with Rayya, or when I collapsed into the utter abandonment of self that is codependency in its most deadly and life-destroying form. I can’t name the exact moment when I made her into my higher power, or when I surrendered all my will and agency to her, or when I decided that it was my job in life to serve her every desire—no matter how much it cost me, physically, emotionally, or financially.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Child, you keep demanding impossible promises from those who cannot even take care of themselves.
But what joy have you ever derived from being so dependent and unassured, so needy, lost, and afraid?
You keep saying you want to count on somebody—
but I say stop counting.
You keep telling me you crave security because the world frightens you.
But the world, my love, is what you are.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
How the hell did I get here? is a question that I believe everybody will have to face at some point during their passage through life. Perhaps even at multiple points. For who among us has never gotten lost, much to our own embarrassment? Who has not ended up in scenarios that are frightening, alienating, shameful, and spirit-crushing? Who has not kept secrets, or been betrayed, or tried to control the behavior of others? Who has not longed for escape from suffering? And who has not reached for substances, people, behaviors, or distractions that offer temporary respite from the built-in discomforts of existence itself?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
The line between a problematic behavior and an addiction is a murky one—perhaps even invisible. But a good test as to whether you’re an addict or not is to answer these three questions as honestly as possible: 1. Have you tried to stop this behavior and you can’t? 2. Have you managed to stop at times—but you can’t stay stopped? 3. Has your behavior brought consequences to your life that might cause a normal person to say, “Wow, I’ll certainly never do that thing again!”—yet you keep doing that thing?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie as a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble.
From Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Motivational
Your tears are my prayers.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Hope
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
From Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
If Satan existed, he could scarcely do better at seeding pain and destruction than to hide himself within the human mind, saying things like “You’re a failure and a fuckup, nobody understands you, you deserve some escape, you should probably just go drink something, or overeat, or spend a bunch of money, or fuck somebody, or take command over someone else’s existence, or blow up your own life, or just kill yourself—but don’t tell anybody I said any of this.” (Satan: translated from the Hebrew as “the accuser”—a shadowy internal figure I know all too intimately.)
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
There are not a lot of women out there who will publicly admit to being sex and love addicts, because it sounds pretty gnarly. In fact, it is gnarly. I won’t get into salacious details here, but I will say that my addiction manifests as a sincere yet deeply misguided belief that somebody outside of myself will miraculously be able to heal me on the inside—thereby making me feel safe, cherished, and whole at last. In real-life terms, this translates as a desperate need to have my existence constantly authenticated and re-authenticated through a romantic partner’s touch, eye contact, verbal reassurance, acts of love, or mere physical presence. How much reassurance is enough for me to finally feel secure? There has never been enough, frankly. There can never be enough.
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
It’s worth questioning, in every partnership: Who is playing the traditional role of the woman here?—meaning, Who is pouring more care and nourishment into this relationship (or project, or institution)? And who is the beneficiary of all that care and nourishment? And what is the cost to the overgiver?
From All the Way to the River
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Relationships
I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker," he continued, as though he had not heard her. "We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.
From The Signature of All Things
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Religion
The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Philosophical
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
As I focus on diligent joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once -- that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.
From Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Happiness
The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
From Eat, Pray, Love
NOT YET RATING
▼
Topic: Life
When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
NOT YET RATING
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Topic: Life
What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together -- in misery, but happy to not be apart.
NOT YET RATING
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Topic: Relationships
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